Category Archives: TurtleIsland.art

Turtle Island Moderators Need Laptops

By Authors, Beadwork, GoFundMe, Indigenous, Indigenous Creatives, Indigenous Mutual Aid, Mvskoke, Native, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.social, TurtleIsland.video

Please donate to or share this GoFundMe if you can

https://www.gofundme.com/f/turtle-island-moderators-need-laptops

Hesci! (Hello)

Michelle and Tzipporah, moderators for Turtle Island, a group of Indigenous social media servers need Apple laptops. Michelle doesn’t have a laptop, just a phone and Tzipporah’s laptop is over 7 years old, underpowered for creative work and on its last legs.

Both Michelle and Tzipporah are citizens of the Mvskoke Nation and live on modest artists incomes. They cannot buy graphics and video editing level laptops without our help, so we are crowdfunding to help them.

They need these laptops to support themselves/family with their creativity, and moderate Turtle Island as unpaid volunteers. Please help if you can.

Mvto! (Thank-you)
-Yehuda, Michelle & Tzipporah

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse

TurtleIsland.art has arrived!

By Backups, TurtleIsland.art, Upgrades

Instagram-like photo sharing and great for artists/creatives

Sunday, September 10, 2023 – The Turtle Island Pixelfed instance TurtleIsland.art is now in operation. Pixelfed, as you may know, is an Instagram-like ActivityPub enabled app. So it federates with our Mastodon instance TurtleIsland.social and other ActivityPub enabled instances.

Currently, registrations are limited to TurtleIsland.social artist/creative users. If you’re a Native/Indigenous artist/creative and would like to give it a spin, sign up at TurtleIsland.social and send me (@Yehuda) a message requesting a login.

Importantly, Pixelfed is beta software and everything that implies. There are imperfections, but we felt it was important enough to be an early adopter. We haven’t found any managed hosting for Pixelfed that meets our standards yet, so we are self hosting this. However, this is a preinstalled docker container so hopefully the automatic upgrades should be painless. All in all though, everything is beta.

There will be once a week cold bare-vps snapshots on Wednesdays 5am-6pm. Additionally all configuration files, media and database storage are backed up daily to a remote secure object storage. In the extremely unlikely event of a system corruption, Turtle Island can be restored fresh in about an hour tops.

Ditto with system upgrades, due to the more surgical nature of the backups, upgrades will be a few minutes at worst. More than likely most upgrades will be a mere blip and not even noticeable.

Thanks!
-Yehuda

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse

About the Servers

By Mastodon, Pixelfed, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.blog, TurtleIsland.social, WordPress

Turtle Island has five servers. Mastodon (2), Pixelfed, PeerTube, and WordPress each have their own dedicated server.

All remote server access and design work is done with an Apple Mac Studio M1 Ultra and an Apple MacBook Pro M2 Pro. Image and graphics editing are done with GIMP and Inkscape.

All the above software is open source. All WordPress plugins used are free versions.

Thanks!
-Yehuda

Useful Links

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse

Donation options

By Donations, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.blog, TurtleIsland.social

Ocmulgee Port of Entrance, 2015, by Richard Thornton. This is a digital reproduction of a historical site in Georgia known as Okmulgee. Mvskoke ancestors built large earthen mounds at Okmulgee and lived there long before Europeans arrived in North America. Fifth slide at Smithsonian Institution.

Help support Indigenous owned/operated/moderated TurtleIsland.social, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.video, TurtleIsland.blog and Allies.social

Turtle Island Internet properties do not sell anything or charge fees. We are volunteer led and donation financed.

We have 5+ servers, as well as CDN storage, backup storage, domain and occasional software expenses. Monthly expenses to run Mastodon (2), Pixelfed (1), Peertube (1) and Web (1) servers average around $280.

Likely, we are set for any growth over the next few months. However if there is a sudden massive influx of new users, all servers have plenty of upgrade capability and we will revise these estimates.

If you receive Pension/Social Security/Disability or less please do not donate. But if you can help our Native/Indigenous Fediverse instances and websites thrive and grow, it would be very much appreciated.

Monthly goals and donations amounts from all sources will be totaled on Ko-fi. Any donations over goal will be split among the moderators.

Buy us a coffee!
https://ko-fi.com/TurtleIsland

Cash.app
https://cash.app/$Yehuda1491

Venmo
https://venmo.com/Yehuda1491

Mvto!
-Yehuda

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse

About TurtleIsland.blog

By Indigenous Creatives, Mastodon, Pixelfed, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.blog, TurtleIsland.social, WordPress

Saabe Dream by Mishiikenh Kwe
Used with permission ©Mishiikenh Kwe https://www.instagram.com/mishiikenhkwe

About TurtleIsland.blog

TurtleIsland.blog is the go to information source for all Turtle Island Internet properties.

Thanks!
-Yehuda

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse

Welcome to TurtleIsland.blog

By Mastodon, Pixelfed, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.blog, TurtleIsland.social, WordPress

Saabe Dream by Mishiikenh Kwe
Used with permission ©Mishiikenh Kwe https://www.instagram.com/mishiikenhkwe

Welcome to TurtleIsland.blog!

Welcome to this brand new NGINX web server. It has been running great so far, much much better than Apache. Still working on optimum configurations though. The content from IndigenousCreatives.social has been moved here, and much new content is planned.

Consider this site your go to place for TurtleIsland.social and TurtleIsland.art information, Native-Indigenous education and news.

#ChangeTheName #AntiIndigenous #Apache

So glad to be getting rid of racist jerks Apache Software Foundation products. Appropriation of Native people and names for products is not cool. I’m glad I have a better option. Sorry, I took this long to completely ditch Apache software.

I have used Apache since sometime in the 2nd half of the 1990’s. I had to compile it myself for whatever version of Unix at that time. Software distribution has come a long way since those days, ha! So here we are – NGINX moving forward.

#LEMP #Ubuntu #NGINX #MySQL #PHP #Webserver #Native #Indigenous #NDN #NativeMastodon #IndigenousMastodon #LandBack #InstanceBack #TurtleIsland #TurtleIslandSocial #TurtleIslandArt #TurtleIslandBlog

Thanks!
Yehuda and the Turtle Island Social/Art/Blog Team

P.S. Turtle Island Internet properties do not sell anything or charge fees. Turtle Island Internet properties are volunteer led and donation financed.

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse

Meet the Turtle Island Team

By Mastodon, Pixelfed, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.blog, TurtleIsland.social, WordPress

Saabe Dream by Mishiikenh Kwe
Used with permission ©Mishiikenh Kwe https://www.instagram.com/mishiikenhkwe

Meet the Turtle Island Team

Michelle Joy Gallagher Soffe

Moderator – Content
Mvskoke Nation citizen

Michelle Joy Gallagher Soffe is an author of poetry and prose from Sacramento, CA. With an affinity for astronomy and physics, she often makes correlations between the corporeal and the cosmos. She is the author of the book Disremembering, a volume of poetry about love and loss available on Amazon or direct from her at nihtgengapress.com

To tip Michelle and help them get a new laptop:
https://ko-fi.com/aph3lion
https://cash.app/$Aphelia

Follow Michelle on Mastodon

Tzipporah Rothschild-Manory

Moderator – Admin – Graphics – Photos
Mvskoke Nation citizen

Tzipporah Rothschild-Manory is a poet, artist, photographer, and beader. Their art is influenced by traditional Mvskoke designs, but contemporary.

Their beadwork e-commerce site is at Cvkvlv.com.

To tip Tzipporah and help them get beading supplies:
https://ko-fi.com/tzipr
https://cash.app/$tzipr
https://venmo.com/Tzip

Follow Tzipporah on Mastodon

Yehuda Rothschild

Moderator – Admin – Web Developer
Mvskoke Nation citizen

Yehuda Rothschild is retired after over 35 years in Information Technology. Now he is mostly the under the hood server guy for TurtleIsland.blog, TurtleIsland.social, TurtleIsland.art, YehudaRothschild.com, and general big mouth. He is working hard to fight racism, and seek land, digital and financial justice for Indigenous people, strengthen reconnecting Natives, and educate allies.

To help pay server expenses or tip (note tip on donation):
https://ko-fi.com/TurtleIsland
https://cash.app/$Yehuda1491
https://venmo.com/Yehuda149

Follow Yehuda on Mastodon

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse

Backup Wednesdays

By Backups, TurtleIsland.art, TurtleIsland.blog, TurtleIsland.social, Upgrades

Backup Wednesdays and other maintenance events

Just a reminder that all Turtle Island servers have weekly cold bare-metal or more accurately cold bare-virtual private server backups. In other words, the servers will be shutdown and backups made while they are off.

These backups will happen during the 5:00am-6:30am CST time period on Wednesday each week. Additionally, servers will occasionally undergo unscheduled upgrades and other maintenance events. Ordinarily upgrades include security fixes that need to be applied immediately. Usually these are done in daytime hours.

Hot database backups will also be performed daily, but these do not require downtime, and are fully transparent to users.

There will be no reminders each week for regularly scheduled backups, but know they are planned for every Wednesday. Unscheduled downtimes will be announced on my TurtleIsland.social account shortly before they happen if possible.

Thanks!
-Yehuda

Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Yehuda
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Tzipporah
Follow on Mastodon – TurtleIsland.social/@Hvresse