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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What tech skills are needed to host Fediverse platforms for a community of people? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

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.