Megalodon: The future of blahaj.

For the past two months, we've been deep in the weeds, focused on a significant undertaking: a complete rebuild of the blahaj.land ecosystem. This project, codenamed "Megalodon," is more than a simple update; it's a fundamental paradigm shift in how we operate, designed to take our platform to the next level with improved stability, enhanced capabilities, and a more robust foundation for future services.

Moving Beyond Yunohost: A Strategic Pivot to Containers

Our previous Yunohost-based infrastructure served its purpose, but to genuinely move the needle and support our growth, a change was necessary. We've made a strategic pivot to a customised, container-based system. This two-month transition has been about getting our ducks in a row to create an architecture that offers superior scalability and allows for more agile deployment of new services. This isn't about reinventing the wheel; it's about adopting a best practice approach for our operational needs.

Fully revamped account management, SSO, and security

A key deliverable of Megalodon is the overhaul of our account management. The existing LDAP system is being phased out. In its place, we're implementing Authentik, a comprehensive identity management solution.
The new portal at https://sso.blahaj.land is already live, replacing the current one. This transition brings significant improvements to the table, including Passkey support, easier password resets, explicit application permissions, and much more to make your experience pleasant, efficient, and secure.

An Update on tar.black: Our Matrix Homeserver

After a thorough review and some serious cost-benefit analysis, it has become clear that the operational overhead for our tar.black Matrix homeserver has become unsustainable.
This is driven by factors including escalating domain renewal costs and the resource consumption of the current Matrix stack.

Therefore, tar.black will be decommissioned in the very near future.

Rest assured, this is a tactical maneuver. We are replacing tar.black with https://blachat.lol, a more efficient and modern Matrix homeserver implementation. We anticipate this will be a game changer for your Matrix experience.
We also plan to mirror our Discord server to the Matrix server, since Discord is businessing harder than ever, which we'll certain will result in the platform becoming even worse! (Frankly we're quite jealous, we're still yet to appoint a CEO ready to ruin the user experience in order to maximise profits, before inevitably announcing bankruptcy... Such a business move...)

It's essential to mention that this will also affect your @tar.black email aliases.
You have until June 15th to transfer your external accounts away from @tar.black addresses.

Enhanced User Services: Security and Flexibility

The transition to a container-based architecture directly benefits user sites and services by providing greater security flexibility, and streamlining deployments. This new model allows us to build and deploy a wider array of applications more effectively.

With a couple click you can deploy your creations using Dockerfile, Docker Compose, or Nixpacks.

Additionally, by setting up a simple webhook in your Git repository settings you may utilise the full potential of our GitOps system,
meaning you can easily configure your resources to automatically build and deploy on new commits, releases, or tags.

Improved Oversight: Advanced Metrics and Monitoring

With the new infrastructure comes an upgraded system for metrics, logging, and monitoring. This gives us increased bandwidth to oversee all services, allowing for a deep dive into performance and proactive issue resolution.

Your Data? Yeah, It Made the Jump Safely

Migrating all that user data was… an experience. But good news! It's all been seamlessly moved* to the new infrastructure.

* - Only the main services like mail, account settings, and Nextcloud Data
User sites have not been migrated yet, more on that later.

The Return of the Ticketing System

We're pleased to announce the reintroduction of our support ticketing system. To open a ticket, you can:

• Email: tickets@blahaj.land
• Use the online portal: https://blahaj.land/tickets/open.php

Now, about that UI… it’s a bit… utilitarian. Especially on mobile. But it was literally the only ticketing system that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg (and possibly a fin). Getting a working system up was the key takeaway here, not winning design awards.

Business investors making incredible business donations to help us business better.

This ambitious overhaul would not have been possible without crucial financial support. Our sincere thanks go to Nicco Loves Linux and Miatech.

Their contributions have enabled us to scale our infrastructure from a single large server to five smaller, more resilient nodes, significantly improving overall reliability.

User sites, SFTP, and new DNS settings for custom email domains and apps

We are sorry to announce that we are (temporarily) losing SFTP support.
Yunohost - the old infrastructure foundation allowed us to set up user websites and other resources with SFTP file management. While it could be considered convenient, it was a bad implementation.

Hosting sites via Yunohost introduced countless issues and slowdowns.
A platform focused on running a small suite of apps for a smaller user base simply wasn't built to handle close to a 100 domains, and even more services.

By May 23rd we expect all users to transition their SFTP sites to Git repositories.

"What if I want to keep the source code private?"
- You can easily keep it that way by simply creating an Access Token to the repository, or inviting @blahajgoblin as a collaborator on Github.
Help: (https://github.com/username/repo-name/settings/access)

After setting up the Git repository, please let us know by creating a ticket!

SFTP Access will come back one day, we just need to develop a solid system to be able to properly maintain it.

New DNS for custom domains

Say goodbye to manual record updates!
You can already replace your existing A and mail-related records with
- CNAME - host.sites.blahaj.land

This new setup will allow up to dynamically manage things like certificates, destinations, mail servers, etc.

RSS feed updates

The new RSS feed URL for news and announcement is https://info.blahaj.land/rss/

The Transition is Ongoing

While major components of Megalodon are now live, the full transition and an effort to flesh out all services will continue over the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience during this period.

Your Feedback is Essential!!!

If you run into any issues, any weirdness, any "is this supposed to do that?" moments, please, please, please use the new ticketing system: tickets@blahaj.land.
This helps me track everything and not lose my mind. Seriously, it's how we move the needle on fixing things efficiently.

A simple email to that address will start a ticket, no need for registering on support portals, using the admittedly pretty outdated website, or filling ouy personal details.

We need you!

This extensive and fundamental paradigm shift means we need to develop many custom solutions.

We could really use some help with:

• General sysadmin support
  • handling backups/updates/user support
• Discord/content moderation
• Frontend and backend development with a stack you're comfortable using
• Handling social media
• Design, branding, and theming the new user interfaces
• Creating a universal API for our services
• Planning out software and new systems

Businessest regards,
The blahaj.land Business Team

(Please excuse the ironic use of corporate jargon, I love pretending to be a huge corporation.)