Hi, I’m just starting out with self hosting and I am currently working on a project meant to serve a small town that I live in. What I would like to do is host a small social media site from a Rapsberry Pi 5. I’m not expecting to have a lot of people using it so I’m not pressured about the hardware requirements at this point in time.

I have a few questions before I go any further.

1. Is it possible to set up a PieFed instance as text only? I’m not interested in moderating images or videos. Also, I’m also running this from a residential connection so I don’t want to affect my home traffic. All aspects of this project are meant to be as minimal as possible to access more people.

2. My ISP blocks ports. I intend to call them soon and talk to them about unblocking ports. If I am unable to do that, my backup plan to simply run an instance that is unfederated. It will act as a message board for my town. Can I set PieFed to a custom port for traffic? For example using piefed.domainname.com:8080 as the address for people to reach my server.

3. Does the registration for new users require any SSL? I’m not entirely sure if that would be affected the same as federation without SSL.

4. Would mail related services be affected by blocked ports? Would I be able to use another email address not associated with my domain name and PieFed instance?

Thanks for any help or information.