this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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Setting up and running your own Fediverse instance is an incredibly empowering thing. A good analogy for it is: imagine you have been renting apartments your whole life and then purchase a home. Your home, where you make all the rules, customize it to your liking and take great care of it because it's YOUR home. That's precisely what I have been doing for a digital home - on the Fediverse - with my GoToSocial microblogging instance: @[email protected].

If the thought of self-hosting makes you immediately tune out, thinking: "oh my, this sounds so complicated and unattainable for a regular, non-technical person" well, I can understand. I had that exact mindset as recently as November 2024. Heck, even December 2024. But then I took the plunge and never looked back. I'm here to tell you about my journey of tech empowerment, made possible by YunoHost and GoToSocial.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

Its no fun, vps are cheap, you can get racknerd 60$ a year 3 core 6gb, run pleroma or sharkey, slightly funner, or friendica/lemmy, most things are more fun to host but you could prob run goto social on a 12$ year vps to be fair

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

How do we feel about the idea of reply controls on Lemmy threads? Limit replies to members of the community, same instance, etc...

[–] [email protected] 13 points 23 hours ago (9 children)

I've always wanted to do this, but I can't afford a VPS. And everytime I look into self-hosting on hardware at home, I just get the impression that it's nearly impossible... My ISP forbids it, and even if I can evade their notice, people say having a public facing setup at home is bound to get you attacked eventually

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

Runtipi plus any vps, easy to setup and has gotosocial (stays more up to date) , or yunohost is easier with more options

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

racknerd 60$ a year 3core 6gb ram can run a lot, littlecreekhosting 3.50 a month 4core 8gb or 7 amonth 8core 16 (you gotta comment on their post on low end talk for littlecreek or you get half ram)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

or free oracle vps , domain is around 12$ a year but porkbun has most domains for half off first year or less, .ing is half off, .buzz is like 1$

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

I got into webhosting rabbithole like a month ago if it isnt obvious, those are the best deals ive found, hetzner, 5$ a month, pay by the hour, is my favorite for testing stuff for cheap if you remember to delete it, invoiced 3rd of the month

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

The annual deals good for just not worrying about paying for it and forgetting about it sometimes

[–] [email protected] 8 points 17 hours ago

Do you have a credit card?

If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that's no reason to not take free shit from them.

(And to the next group of people: I'm closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven't banned me, so I'm inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than "nothing".)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago

It's not a perfect solution (and I know people don't love Cloudflare) but their Tunnels project is free. Hides your personal IP from the world, and provides some protection against known exploits.

But a VPS is quicker and easier, for sure.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah if you aren't down to publicly expose your IP address / port forward, the cheapest way I can think of still involves a several $/mo VPS that just reverse proxies home to a more powerful PC. That's what I do since I'm behind CGNAT.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I hosted it on a 1€/month vps at ionos. An instance with multiple users actually, and it runs just great. Not a lot of space but hey, that's 12€ per year

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago

Wow that's impressive! I tend to be very value oriented, and at the sub $5 price, you're getting so little that I feel like you're mostly paying for a public IP and bandwidth. And of course selfhosting your compute is usually a win, especially if you already have something laying around. So I just pay the public IP tax for a reverse proxy and home host it all. I would probably go with a cheaper VPS for my reverse proxy but I need the confidence it'll hold up to multiple friends Plex streaming.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Self-hosting isn't too bad. With a properly configured router (not as hard as it sounds), if you're hosting something like a lemmy instance, the worst people can do is spam you with too many requests. An ISP that disallows self-hosting is a bummer though... having a static IP is pretty essential.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

I don't have a static IP I just use a dynamic DNS. I don't mess with self hosting fediverse cos I don't wanna risk illegal content on my server tho.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Your ISP forbids what, exactly?

It is complicated but Yunohost does make it a lot simpler.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

Running a web server on my residential connection is against my ISP'S terms of service.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

A VPS costs 5 bucks a month.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

Fair enough

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago

I really just want a single person instance so I can not sorry that mods go crazy one day and I can just be a control freak.