I’m ready to completely jump in to using decentralized, federated platforms, however most people I know aren’t fully there. It strikes me that this moment in time, where a lot of people are newly actively aware and frustrated by Meta and Twitter’s actions, is ideal to get people to switch over to new platforms.
To encourage people in my community to join platforms on the Fediverse, I want to host instances of various platforms (probably Mastodon and Pixelfed to start with). Having a specific instance on these platforms to point people towards would probably help a lot of the folks I know get on board.
However, I’m scared I’m not knowledgeable enough to admin these public instances for others. I know some basic networking, I self-host a bunch of stuff with Docker on an old laptop, and I definitely am smart enough to figure out how to start up instances of these platforms. However, I’m mostly concerned with whether I’d be able to properly maintain and secure these instances. I wouldn’t want people to be soured on decentralized social media just because I don’t know what I’m doing.
Any thoughts, words of encouragement, tips, warnings, etc. are welcomed!
I’m very comfortable in Docker and honestly most of the software out there in the Fediverse is weird. Like they make containerized deployments much more convoluted than they are supposed to be.
GoToSocial is maybe the least bad that I’ve tried so far. Most of the more popular ones are, IMO, really really bad on this front.
I’ve had their Stans counter this but then they point me to the process that they followed and it’s like something out of a Hogwart’s spell book compared to what most self hosted containerized apps are like.
Would you simply host for yourself or for others?
The issue I have with self-hosting is that the day something goes wrong, you lose your account along with all your posts. And if you host for others, they also lose all of theirs.
I know this isn’t the answer you were looking for. But I have the knowledge to self host and all. I have 17 years of experience as a Linux sysadmin, a software developer and now a DevOps specialist. And I honestly don’t want to bother because of the responsibility. However, there are organizations and non-profits who have the resources to host stable long-running instances. But they need money. So I donate to the instances I use instead.
But it you REALLY want to learn, start learning about Linux web servers, databases, networking, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes) and a good bit of cybersecurity. Hosting stuff on your laptop is a good start.
There are some self-help chats (usually on Discord, IRC or Matrix) with other admins that you should join to get a feel of what typical problems arise and how to fix them. But it is usually not that much of a deal and you seem to be already on a good way.
Specifically for ActivityPub and other federated services it is important to know that even if there are only few people using your server the remote federated activities can have a quite significant impact on the performance of your server and RAM/Storage requirements.
Remote federated servers also usually “remember” who they talked to via special cryptographic keys and so on, meaning that if something goes wrong for some reason it might not always be possible to just delete everything and start new from scratch on the same domain as the remote servers will refuse to talk to your “new” server. Just something to keep in mind and another reason why backups are important.
If you’re selfhosting already, you know how to deploy it. Are those services available in the internet via some domain? Having an SSL certificate with automated renewal is quite important. Make sure to update the machine the service runs on regular.
Backups! Having daily snapshots to be able to roll back if necessary is great. If you want to use your own hardware, I suggest Proxmox. If you want to rent a VPS, see if the cloud provider has something like that as well (will likely cost a little extra). Also, check the service’s documentation on what data to back to in order to be able to restore on a new machine in case your server explodes. (3-2-1 rule). Shutting down the instance with no prior warning because of some error you can’t recover from because of no working backup is the best way to spoil anyone’s experience.
If you use docker, make sure to have it behind a reverse proxy and configure your docker ports to be bound to localhost only so you don’t accidentally expose your database to the internet.
Think not only about technical deployment but also governance. Set instance rules and think how you want to do moderation. See if you have someone to help you with that.
Go for it! Set it up, fiddle around for a while and when you get comfortable, invite your friends. Just be upfront that there might be an occasional downtime for maintenance (which you will advertise a day before or so) every now and then.
None of my selfhosted stuff is available to the public internet, I run everything through Wireguard. However I do know how to get SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt because of previous messing around.
Backups is definitely something that I’m lazy about with my selfhosting that I’d need to address for a public service. I currently just manually copy over the few essential files I have to my server, my desktop and my phone. If I commit to hosting stuff for others, proper backups are definitely at the top of the priority list.
Governance is something I’ve already thought a lot about, since these services would be aimed at a specific minority community.
Thanks for your comment! I’m currently messing about with Hugo to build a landing page to explain decentralized, federated servers and link to services I might host in the future. I really want to do this, I don’t want to just accept that the common communication platforms are controlled by American fascists.
Feel free to hit me up if you need some assistance with setting it up, I can help with the initial setup, making sure it’s secure and setting up backups.
There’s also Managed Hosting: Hosting a Fediverse instance (a list of providers): “However, there are hosting companies that can take care of the installation and technical maintenance for you. You get a pre-installed application, mainly Mastodon, which is also technically maintained. You yourself are an admin and can do some things in the application’s admin menu, such as manage your own users. This way, you can also allow a larger group of people to access the Fediverse.”
Are you sure this is a serious offer? This seems suspicious to me: “If you do not want or do not care about having your own server, but still want to be part of the fediverse. With these service packages you get an account at our flagship instances at a low cost. Share a group package with your friends and make it even cheaper!”
Do I understand correctly that you have to pay 29.99 just to get an account on their “flagship instance”? or how is it to be understood?
