Gytis Repečka

Data professional and tech enthusiast from Lithuania 🇱🇹 🇪🇺

Remember legendary MK3 on 16-bit Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in US)? Use following cheats in start menu to enable extra options.

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WriteFreely is open source, lightweight blogging platform written in Go programming language.

Motivation to build WriteFreely

While absolute king of blogs is WordPress, which in fact [powers somewhat 30% of all websites][1], some say it is overloaded, choosing perfect theme is extremely difficult and some (especially free) plugins are poisoned with different kinds of tracking. I do use WordPress on my main site as well, but over the years I' ve figured it seriously takes time to post an article (and I'm not yet even aquainted with Gutenberg).

WriteFreely here is a nice alternative claiming to offer a distraction-free writing experience. While supporting HTML, software mainly relies and endorses markdown. I do not plan ditching WordPress anytime soon, but I was very curious to try out lightweight platform that natively federates.

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You might have already noticed I use Mastodon for my main fediverse handle @gytis@fedi.lt. Current version is 4.2.8.

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As CentOS still ships MariaDB 5.5, some users might still have an issue initializing WriteFreely's schema.sql.

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After upgrading OpenWRT to version 18.06.2 (current release at the time of writing) on one of my Xiaomi MiWiFi Mini routers I started seeing this error in System Log:

unknown user or group: dnsmasq

In addition to that users were not able to connect to WiFi due to not received DHCP configuration.

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Fediverse is the universe of federated servers (instances) used for publishing online content. The beauty of it is that despite software those instances run or policies their owners enforce, servers can talk to each other (federate) using open standards like ActivityPub or others.

I got very much interested in the idea of federation in the beginning of 2019 after deleting my Facebook account and pages.

First server I have installed was Mastodon (source) on mastodon.lt. I use it as Twitter and Facebook alternative for short posts and communication.

Next followed WriteFreely (source) instance I've set up on fedi.dev – a freshly available top level domain sponsored by Google. This instance is where you are reading this post from.

For posting videos I've setup instance of PeerTube (source) on videotape.me. This software is particularly interesting because as soon as you start viewing video, you are seeding it to other viewers via JavaScript based torrent client that runs on your browser. Ingenious!

Next will be installation of PixelFed – federated image sharing platform to substitute Instagram. Update: tried to install Pixelfed – too much trouble: system relies on Laravel framework, needs composer, is managed with artisan, runs jobs with Horizon... I wish it was vanilla PHP 😄 Domain image.as will have to wait – I'll use it when snap.as decides to open source their code 🤓 Update: snap.as might go out as library for WriteFreely. Looking forward to – would be even better.


My name is Gytis Repečka, I am Solution Architect and data professional. I enjoy using, promoting and contributing to open source software and love communicating about tech to both advanced and non-tech people. Visit Inretio for consulting services. Comment by mentioning me @gytisrepecka@social.gyt.is on Fediverse.

When Apache HTTPD server pretty much entirely dominated the market, one of the first tasks admin would do was to hide version number:

ServerTokens ProductOnly

Remember this tag? :)

Nowadays as nginx is so popular, especially if you need high performance reverse proxy (WriteFreely runs behind proxy too), it might be useful to hide it's version number.

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Got couple followers on Mastodon ibstance, let's see if this message reaches them.

Update: apparently this is a bug at Mastodon as told by write.as.


My name is Gytis Repečka, I am Solution Architect and data professional. I enjoy using, promoting and contributing to open source software and love communicating about tech to both advanced and non-tech people. Visit Inretio for consulting services. Comment by mentioning me @gytisrepecka@social.gyt.is on Fediverse.

Hello and welcome to miniblog by Gytis Repečka! While I run my main blog at gyt.is which is powered by WordPress, this is my second federated platform (after mastodon.lt) which I installed to join fediverse.

You might as well notice domain – fedi.dev is shortened version of “fediverse”. Well, I actually scored fediverse.dev too as soon as .dev top level domain became available in February 28th.

Stay tuned for more content (I'm still learning markdown)!


My name is Gytis Repečka, I am Solution Architect and data professional. I enjoy using, promoting and contributing to open source software and love communicating about tech to both advanced and non-tech people. Visit Inretio for consulting services. Comment by mentioning me @gytisrepecka@social.gyt.is on Fediverse.