There's always a risk when using software that's only developed by a single person.

I've been using @[email protected], a single-user self-hosted ActivityPub server for this account for a few years now. I really like a lot about it, but especially I like that it's easy to host on my own hardware, so I'm never beholden to someone else to run my instance.

But, yesterday I finally got around to upgrading my @[email protected] box to 41 (I know, I should've done it months ago). With that upgrade came a Python version bump to 3.13.2. I always have trouble with Python every time it updates to a new version and suddenly a bunch of my stuff doesn't work anymore, but it's usually no more trouble than reinstalling everything.

Unfortunately, microblog.pub hasn't been updated for nearly two years, and many of the dependencies were pinned at versions that don't support Python 3.13.2. It took me several hours of digging through dependencies to figure out which ones I had to update to make it work again.

So, this account was offline for most of a day, and part of that was the actual Fedora upgrade, but much of it was trying to fix the broken dependencies.

And this all happened because the developer hasn't kept it up-to-date. I'm not upset at him personally. This is a part-time project, and it looks like something he doesn't personally use anymore. These things happen, and he has no obligation to me as a user of his software.

But, I've definitely learned an important lesson in all this: if I'm going to use software as an important part of my day-to-day activities, and that software is developed by a single person, then that person better be me.