Weeknotes no.10 – migrating Mastodon to my homelab with Cloudflare Tunnels
i’ve had this thought for a while to fully migrate my cloud VPS to the homelab. i got into the whole #homelab bubble in early 2025 when i bought a GMKtec G3 Plus mini pc. it’s been a great nerd playground setting up NixOS and k3s. last year i added a Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q which i bought second hand on Kleinanzeigen. total bargain at that time considering the included 32GB of memory. this one also doesn’t run in our home, but a different off-site building with good 1gig internet connection (still connected to my Tailscale network). while those two machines are running useful applications (e.g. home assistant), they are quite underused.
at the same time i was spending 50+ euros on a VPS (from UpCloud) each month. this one mainly ran my Matrix homeserver (using tuwunel), my mastodon instance (beoriginal.social), and more recently also my AT Proto PDS.
the migration blocker so far: ingress access and tunneling.
since both pcs live behind dynamic IPs and NAT the only option was to expose them with tunnels. Tailscale (my preferred option) however has this weird “Traffic sent over a Funnel is subject to non-configurable bandwidth limits.” sentence in their docs. is that 1GB? TB? PB?
so the other easy option was Cloudflare, whose tunnel option overall feels more mature. but that meant migrating the domain (or at least nameservers) into their hands. since the services don’t run on my primary domain, but on the beoriginal.social world, i finally gave in this week. after 48 hours of wait time disabling DNSSEC, it was time to migrate. overall, this worked out really well. a few config changes and the k3s deployments were on the different host. Cloudflare tunnels were a learning curve, but seem really performant and solid so far.
tip: run at least two cloudflare container replicas (no autoscaling)! i thought i could get away with one, but it’s actually more stable, especially for re-applying configs or restarting pods.
in other homelab news
- moshi (whose iphone & ipad app i love) made a desktop/ browser version which is quite fun to use
- i also played with
fxthe last two weeks, but somehow it doesn’t feel right. it is more minimal and easier to set up, but somehow also has a mind of its own and often ignores stuff and follows its own path… - after having it on my to do list for too many weeks, i finally set up my own Open WebUI deployment: works really well and seems like a good central solution instead of chat apps on every computer, plus easy remote access with Tailscale!
- downside: they don’t follow the normal skills.md format with yaml frontmatter and import/export JSON files :/