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Mastodon question
Question to whoever here uses Mastodon and is technically-inclined:
How reasonable an idea is it to run your own mastodon instance for solo purposes? (eg. as one would run their own email server, or at least point a host's mx to their own domain)
How much would this cost, and is it possible to reliably secure an instance to run as a one-person federated instance easily?
I guess how much it costs would scale based on how many individual accounts follow the one account on the instance, yes?
Many people do exactly that, so it's definitely feasible. More interestingly, there are "Mastodon-like" options, like Pleroma, that are designed specifically for simple self-hosting, for solitary or "small group" personal use, but can still share with the broader Fediverse (including Mastodon).
I'm intrigued.
Is high uptime required when self-hosting? Beyond the instance being inaccessible, what would happen to my content if my instance were down for 1 hour/24 hours/1 week?
If you post locally on your own instance, and that instance goes down, I should still see your content if it's been federated elsewhere - but not forever. At least on Mastodon, both posts and media have separate caches with configurable expirations.
If a post and/or media is no longer cached, I believe Mastodon will attempt to access the original source for it. Failing that, the universe implodes upon itself, and we never get to see Firefly season two.
I figured I'd update this post since many people are interested in Mastodon at the moment.
Simon Willinson has posted essentially exactly what I want:
https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodon
I'm also looking closely at this: Takahē: An efficient ActivityPub Server for small installs with multiple domains
Depending on your needs, also have a look at microblogpub.
The default appearance is... well, it's ugly. But it does have style sheets and templates you can customize, and there's a docker container available from the developer.
Update! Digital Ocean's Mastodon app has been updated to 4.x. I didn't want to do this until this was done but now that it's ready, I finally got around to doing this.
I followed Simon's and Andrew's advices and managed to set up @jerome@leclan.ch - which proxies on fedi.leclan.ch without having to run mastodon on the root domain. Neat!
https://fedi.leclan.ch/@jerome
Thanks for the help and suggestions yall.
I currently run a Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi 4. Mastodon has a single-user mode.
I was wondering if anyone here has done that. There are now a number of tutorials online specifically about hosting a Masto instance on your own Pi. I'm a huge fan of self-hosting anything you can, and if you have a static IP, doing it from home is a really neat idea. And as with hosting any service, you need to (get to) learn about all the security risks of hosting out of your own home in order to mitigate them. @0x4A, out of curiosity, did you do anything specific to tighten up your instance? Aside from single-user mode?
Nothing that I would consider extraordinary by modern day I-like-to-tinker-with-things standards:
I run a very small instance (3-4 active users). For a long time, it was just me. I use a managed host (masto.host), who was only charging me $8/month for a long time. They recently did away with the grandfathered hosting prices, so now I pay $19/month, which I have no problem affording. I think I’d be happy paying up to $50/month if my instance grows a bit, provided the service continues to be as great as it has over the past four years.
Do you have your own domain name? A hosted solution is ideal for me if it’s reliable.
You don’t have to, but I’d recommend it. You can use instancename.masto.host.
I've seen a number of instances go down because maintaining and upgrading the server was too much of a hassle. I have no personal experience in this area, however.