Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂<p>This <a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/gotosocial" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>GoToSocial</span></a> account has become a step-by-step tutorial in how to self-host the publishing platform <a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/ghost" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Ghost</span></a> (and troubleshoot issues) 😆</p><p>If you're not interested in my messages on the subject, I will be using a new hashtag <a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/eleselfhostsghost" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>EleSelfHostsGhost</span></a> so you can just mute it.</p><p>I'm a little late to the party because everything is now set-up and running smoothly:<br>✅ I manually installed Ghost on my Ubuntu VPS<br>✅ I imported all the old posts and media: <a href="https://news.elenarossini.com" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://news.elenarossini.com</a><br>✅ I installed <a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/apache" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Apache</span></a> to use <a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/varnish" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Varnish</span></a> cache and changed the cache's maxAge so that a bit of traffic wouldn't overwhelm my VPS<br>✅ I published and shared on Mastodon a new blog post: <a href="https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://news.elenarossini.com/what-im-up-to-march-april-2025-edition/</a> Thanks to Varnish and the maxAge cache tweak, the VPS withstood the "Mastodon stampede" (the post had made it to Explore!)</p><p>So far so good.</p><p>👹 but when I tried to send that blog post as a newsletter to just 210 people, <a href="https://aseachange.com/tags/mailgun" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mailgun</span></a> immediately flagged me as a spammer and froze my account 😱</p><p>It took about 48 hours of back-and-forth emails with the Mailgun team to convince them I'm not a spammer and to get my account reinstated.</p><p>Now, why am I sharing all this?</p><p>In case you are also tempted to self-host Ghost, I found that the official Ghost - Mailgun documentation has little information available. But I discovered this super helpful post in the Ghost Forums and I will be trying this tweak to see if it makes a difference:</p><p><a href="https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-send-newsletter-with-correct-mailgun-api-keys/34186/6" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-send-newsletter-with-correct-mailgun-api-keys/34186/6</a></p><p>And yes, I'm aware that if you sign up for my newsletter you will get an email with a warning "this message failed the domain authentication" (or something along these lines). Problem is, when I implemented a tweak, changing config settings, the alert went away but I saw a spike in activity in my Dashboard, as if I had sent 600 emails (I did not). For now I can live with the warning.</p><p>I appreciate Ghost's new implementation of a spam filter because around the same time I got really suspicious signups originating from the same domain.</p><p>Anyway after I change all this I will try to send once again my blog post as a newsletter.</p><p>Special thanks to my parents for looking after my little one so I can do all this while she's on a school vacation ❤️</p>