Running Ktistec the First Time

One of Ktistec's design goals is to make installation and configuration as easy as possible. Rather than multiple supporting data store services, Ktistec uses Sqlite. The database, along with uploaded images, are stored on disk, for easy setup (and, more importantly, backup).

When you run Ktistec the first time, you'll set up the instance, and then you'll set up the primary account.

Ktistec needs to know the name of its permanent home on the internet. The host name is part of the identity of every account on the instance. My identity is "toddsundsted@epiktistes.com"—other federated hosts, and users, send messages and other content to me at "epiktistes.com". (This means you'll need a domain of your own, too.) Give the instance a site name and submit.

Once you name the instance, you create the primary account. Ktistec current supports only one account. This is intentional—another one of Ktistec's design goals is to promote a more fully distributed fediverse. A fediverse with a handful of large, multiuser services isn't a whole lot better than the world we had before, imo. (But don't worry—secondary accounts are on the roadmap.)

At a minimum, you need to specify the username and the password of the account. You can use a single character for the username, but you'll need six characters that include both letters, numbers and symbols for the password. Display name and summary are optional.

Once those two steps are done, you're online!

#ktistec

i put the finishing touches on content editing and presentation.

because i want to support long form content, one of my goals was inline images that present as attachments on other implementations like mastodon. my choice of editor, trix, handles image uploads, which is nice, but the generated markup is verbose and suboptimal (trix uses br instead of p tags to break up text into paragraphs, for example).

#ktistec

i just pushed commits that add a settings page and handle image uploads (for background image and profile icon). a lot of code was already written and supported image upload from the editor—i just had to bend it to my purpose. i'm using FilePond to handle preview and upload in the browser.

generally, i'm pretty happy with the result!

#ktistec

i implemented support for in-the-flow images with attachments as the fallback on federated platforms that don’t support them.

saki shows up in the flow on epiktistes and as an attachment elsewhere.

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