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2024-11-18 Being on small fediverse instances
The fediverse is the network of social media instances that communicate via ActivityPub, mostly Mastodon but others exist as well. My own instance runs GoToSocial. The benefit is that nobody can force you to look at ads or sell your data.
Running such an instance means that you need the following:
- a server and the admin skills to run it
- space to store all the media files (my media folder currently uses about 19 GiB)
- space to store all the messages (my database currently uses about 9 GiB)
But if you have a friend who runs one, or you're a member of an association that runs one, and you trust their admins, you can hop on. Some friendly souls even run servers out of their own pockets, for free, relying on donations to keep their servers up and running.
What I want to say: it's possible to be part of the independent web.
There are, unfortunately, also problems:
- on larger instances, moderator burnout sometimes happens
- on growing instances, budgets sometimes grow out of control
- many people are harassed out of sight of the public
I think some people might prefer the bigger corporate players:
- Twitter/X
- Bluesky
- Threads
There are a lot more people on those networks, that's for sure. Personally, I follow about 700 people with three accounts and I have about the same number of people following me, I think. This is plenty! I think it would be an illusion for me to think that in network with millions more people my reach and influence would reach new heights. On the contrary, the algorithm would probably bury my posts and even the people who do want to see my posts would have to dig for them, past ads, sponsored posts and posts with higher engagement metric.
My guess is that we often imagine our alternatives selectively. We imagine the grass to be greener and our prospects to be better, elsewhere.
If you're looking to get started, I'd be happy to help.
Some more notes: The Mastodon Client protocol is wholly separate from the typical ActivityPub server-to-server protocol and not the same as the rarely implemented ActivityPub server-to-client protocol. It's limited, but good enough for a large number of applications.
The two main uses I have seen:
- separate user interface implementations, be it new front-ends on the web or apps on phones and desktops
- bots
The ability to do all that without a corporation forcing you to only use official apps so that they can spy on you or monetize you (forcing you to watch the ads) is a great boon. In addition to that, some servers have very different web front-ends and some servers (like the one I use, GoToSocial), have no web front-end for reading and posting. This has reduced the burden on developers considerably.
#Fediverse
- *2024-11-19**. Related:
So you’re considering self-hosting? You heard good things about GoToSocial? I like it. I use it. This post is about the problems you should be expecting at the moment. – 2024-08-25 GoToSocial problems
- *2024-11-19**. I’m reducing the number of days to keep remote media from 7 days to 3 days. I want to know whether that reduces the media storage space requirements by half.