Given what's goin' on Fosstodon-wise, there is presumably a few more people than usual trying to figure out what their next Fedi home should be. If you already have a bit of a following, my suggestion is not to join an instance, but BE an instance (i.e. set up a personal instance). Here's some related stuff I've written and resources!
- Owning my own social: shellsharks.com/own-my-social
- #GoToSocial on K&T Host: shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/…
- Hosting providers list: shellsharks.com/notes/2023/08/…
Owning My Own Social
A walkthrough of how and why I stood up my own personal Mastodon instance.shellsharks
Phillip
in reply to shellsharks • • •shellsharks
in reply to Phillip • • •Samuel Lison
in reply to shellsharks • • •shellsharks
in reply to Samuel Lison • • •A Guide to Implementing ActivityPub in a Static Site (or Any Website) - Q1 2025 Updates
maho.devlqdev
in reply to shellsharks • • •Samuel Lison
in reply to lqdev • • •lqdev
in reply to Samuel Lison • • •@samuel I personally don't use Ghost so couldn't tell you much more beyond what's on their website and repo.
github.com/TryGhost/ActivityPu…
What you described is my general understanding.
GitHub - TryGhost/ActivityPub: A full-featured ActivityPub server for networked publishing with Ghost
GitHubSamuel Lison
in reply to lqdev • • •yeah I had a look into it, and looks like that are working on as well as taking input from the community for, adding an ActivityPub and Fediverse backend to their product. Hopefully it will be part of their opensource version and not just their hosted version 😁
I saw this page: activitypub.ghost.org which is for their paid version I think buit their documentation leads to this ghost.org/tutorials… and a form for all of us that are interested to fill out: tally.so/r/m67X4P
✅ Remind me to change this title
Team Ghost (Tutorials)Unus Nemo
in reply to shellsharks • •@shellsharks
Within the first week on the Fediverse, which was not so long ago for me, I decided I was going to have my own Instance. I went with Friendica because I like the default interface and I do not like the micro-bloggin concept at all. I was going to do exactly what you did in regards to having a separate blog and post links to my mastodon before I discovered Friendica.
I decided that I would make my Instance available to others emigrating from Meta though so it is not a private Instance. It has been a challenge and I am a very experienced System Admin with decades of experience or I probably would not have gotten it setup so quickly. Because of my aversion to Canonical and my preference for RHEL, I went with Rocky 9, which gave me some other challenges. As Friendica uses Debian based systems by default. Such as having to compile my own php-modules for imagemagick, etc. Which require setting up copr for php to upgrade. Though most of that was pret
... Show more...@shellsharks
Within the first week on the Fediverse, which was not so long ago for me, I decided I was going to have my own Instance. I went with Friendica because I like the default interface and I do not like the micro-bloggin concept at all. I was going to do exactly what you did in regards to having a separate blog and post links to my mastodon before I discovered Friendica.
I decided that I would make my Instance available to others emigrating from Meta though so it is not a private Instance. It has been a challenge and I am a very experienced System Admin with decades of experience or I probably would not have gotten it setup so quickly. Because of my aversion to Canonical and my preference for RHEL, I went with Rocky 9, which gave me some other challenges. As Friendica uses Debian based systems by default. Such as having to compile my own php-modules for imagemagick, etc. Which require setting up copr for php to upgrade. Though most of that was pretty simple. Setting up sendmail was a hoot. To satisfy Gmail I had to do some dns record manipulation to setup so-called anti-spamming tools they ask for. There was also plenty to do with getting SELinux to play nice with my Services 😉.
After I jumped a lot of hurdles I then found that the default configuration of Friendica had some glaring flaws and I had to make some changes to get things to run smoothly and PHP-FPM and MariaDB still like to shutdown periodically though I put a band-aid on that by writing a shell script to check whether httpd, fpm-php and mariadb were running, and if not start them. Then added it to the cron to run every 15 minutes.
Since the service check script things have been running pretty smooth. If you decide to go back to VPS please get in touch I will certainly help you out. I can even help you setup sendmail so you do not need a smtp relay.
Though for development purposes I like podman (think docker) I am not a fan of having production servers in containers. My VPS is on IONOS and their pricing is very reasonable. I use only my MariaDB datastore and it is handling things fine. I could probably reduce usage even more if I cut down persistence some on posts on my Instance.
The main Issue with self hosting for many is that propagation tends to suck, unless you already have a huge following such as you have. I had to enable a relay on my instance to help compensate for a lack of users and followers. I would also mention, not that you do not realize this, though someone reading your post and thinking they could setup their own instance to troll and bother people forget it. Your statement:
shellsharks@shellsharks.social wrote:
Is not entirely accurate, ask FOSStodon. If you run a poorly moderated or abusive Instance other Instances will block you. And that will deplatform you. I know you realize this and I am not mentioning this for your benefit but for those that might think that it would be a great idea to propagate their abuse on Fediverse and avoid moderation.
You take care and be sure to let me know if you need help in the event that you ever do decide to self host again on a VPS.
Screenshot of my Instance:
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