I am thinking about hosting my own Mastodon server from home on a Raspberry Pi (Pi4 8GB)?

  1. Are there good tutorials out there?
  2. What’s the annual cost just to host yourself?

@linux @nixCraft @raspberrypi

  • @[email protected]English
    4•9 months ago

    Have you looked into nostr? It offers most of the same features of Mastodon except that:

    • Your identity is not tied to your instance. If your instance closes up shop, you keep all your followers, followees, DMs, etc
    • You can send encrypted DMs, so your instance admin can’t read them
    • Cool tipping functionality so you can tip people if you like their posts. Or don’t use it. It’s optional.
    • Most nostr clients have some built-in filtering functionality to block out things that are NSFW, crypto-related, etc. Different relays have different moderation policies, much like mastodon instances.

    You can run your own relay of course.

    • @[email protected]
      2•9 months ago

      Your identity is not tied to your instance. If your instance closes up shop, you keep all your followers, followees, DMs, etc

      This is one of the major advantages Bluesky’s protocol (AT Protocol) has over ActivityPub. ActivityPub doesn’t have anything built-in to support this. On Bluesky, you can use your own domain name as your username, and freely move from one server to another while keeping the same username (once they open up federation). It’s configured through a DNS TXT record.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•9 months ago

        Still doesn’t beat nostr imo.

        Bluesky:

        • Identity not tied to instance
        • You have to buy and administer a domain name, which is technically complex and costs $10.
        • DNS is also subject to censorship by firewalls

        Nostr:

        • Identity is not tied to an instance
        • Your private keys (identity) are generated by your app. No purchase or administration required
        • Censorship is much more difficult
      • @[email protected]English
        4•9 months ago

        No, but some functionality could be bolted onto it for that purpose. But it is a federated network, just within it’s own protocol. Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc) run on an underlying protocol: ActivityPub, so they can all federate with each other within ActivityPub.

        Nostr runs on an underlying protocol also confusingly called nostr. Nostr’s main “interface” is a twitter clone, but the underlying protocol supports things like video streaming sites etc and some interfaces have been built for that purpose.