Pleroma Blog

My family needs a private place like this. I put a non-federated Pleroma instance on a free tier Google Cloud VM. Pleroma is a lightweight alternative to Mastodon and it requires very few resources to handle ~10 users. It's compatible with more popular Mastodon so there is a lot of available clients apart from the web version. Highly recommend you give it a try. https://pleroma.social/

> How has that experience been? The thought crossed my mind but I didn't know if the effort/cost would be worth it. It's been awesome, really. I run Pleroma[1], which is magnitudes lighter than Mastodon, and I can comfortably run it on my Raspberry Pi, from home. And due to the nature of ActivityPub, my server going down doesn't mean I miss out on messages/mentions etc. It all federates when I come back online. > Also, how much of your curated feed is Mastodon-like, and how much is other kinds of content? Been poking around at blog platforms that connect to the fediverse and would love to hear some insight if you have any. It's all mostly just Mastodon/Pleroma and PeerTube on the occasion. The other stuff doesn't get too much traction across the network, at least from my experience. [1]: https://pleroma.social

Have you seen the Pleroma? It's like mastadon but written in elixir so it's really snappy. It's made by a group of friends : Lain, the rabbit, mama rinpatch, and hj. I really like it. It looks more like classic Twitter and it's able to run on a rasperry pi. It even includes a mastadon front end, called Glitch. https://pleroma.social/

You're perfectly free to run your own instance and post whatever you like. Others might not want to read it, but that's your problem - you don't inherently deserve an audience, you have to convince people that you're worth following. Luckily for you, there's also https://pleroma.social where they might align with your values[1] a lot more. 1 - I am pro free speech, however many on the right these days seem to think that free speech means they should be free to insult, abuse, impose their religion etc. on others, while also being free to ignore people's right to kneel, protest, worship Satan, support Palestine or whatever else they might want to do. If that is the sort of "free speech" you're looking for, Mastodon might not be for you, otherwise it's a perfectly free speech tolerant place.

While mastodon.social would ensure you are always on the latest branch of the mainline Mastodon server software as it's the 'flagship' maintained by Mastodon's main/original developer, its large size has caused an increasing number of instances to mute (still allowing their users to follow users on mastodon.social, but not to include its posts in their 'federated timeline'), or outright block the instance (meaning none of the posts on mastodon.social are accessible to the instance's users at all). Reasons for these decisions can include but are not limited to: - the instance has grown too big and thus some consider it counter-productive towards the federated nature of the protocol - disagreement with the direction its main developer / maintainer is taking Mastodon, such as intentionally hiding the local timeline from the official iPhone app - some consider it under-moderated, or not responding quickly enough to reports - disagreement over its content moderation guidelines - in case of a mute, it could also be not wanting their federated timeline to be flooded with primarily mastodon.social posts Lack of federation between these instances and mastodon.social could be a reason not to pick mastodon.social. (Similar situation applies to mastodon.online btw, which is a spin-off server of m.s.) Another reason to pick a different instance could be not wanting to use mainline Mastodon software. For example because you want to run your own instance on limited hardware…

Demanding fair play from Google, Facebook and other large corporations is a losing strategy, especially if the government is not on your side. They have too much freedom to rank search results, advertisements and your feed items however they want to, up to the point where censorship is indistinguishable from their algorithms deciding that something is simply of no interest to you. You can't complain if your recommended videos feed is full of "cat videos" and has no political content you are interested in. The real solution to censorship is federation. We are bad at making decentralized search engines, and projects like YaCy [1] have never been successful, partly because it is hard to make ranking algorithms decentralized. But projects like Mastodon [2], Pleroma [3] and PeerTube [4] already have made federated social networks where you can decide what you subscribe to and receive it regardless of someone else decisions. The technical part is simple and transparent and if your provider tries to censor the sources you like, you can always switch to another one or host it yourself. [1] https://www.yacy.net/en/ [2] https://joinmastodon.org/ [3] https://pleroma.social/ [4] https://joinpeertube.org/

I too self host my instance. I opted to use Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/) for a backend to interact with the fediverse because of the easier setup and lower hosting requirements. It’s been working for a few years now and (luckily) I never had major incidents. It’s very refreshing to be in full control of one’s data (compared to the centralised experience with other socials like Twitter and Facebook).

The nice thing is that you don't have to run a Mastodon instance to partake in the fediverse, there are a number of other server platforms that can be used. Another popular one is Pleroma[0], which to my understanding is much lighter-weight. [0]: https://pleroma.social/

If you want to erect your own fediverse server, Pleroma is an option, and arguably superior in many ways https://pleroma.social/

I'll use this opportunity to mention Pleroma [1], my preferred alternative to Mastodon & others. It's much more lightweight than Mastodon. 1: https://pleroma.social/

If you're considering Mastodon, you might want to instead use Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/) which provides access to Mastodon instances but is less demanding of computing resources, and easier to create your own instance (if you choose to go that route) as it has fewer dependencies.

If you want a more lightweight server-side software that can access Fediverse, I found two good candidates (I am looking for other suggestions): - GoToSocial: https://docs.gotosocial.org/ - Pleroma: https://pleroma.social/

with all the attention towards mastodon, people should know about pleroma https://pleroma.social/ which aims to be lighter version of mastodon. it runs on a raspberry pi and is almost 1:1 compared to mastodon so that should get some attention also

There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in terms of memory & cpu usage. DB backend is postgres. It's also by default far less cache heavy than Mastodon (which caches every external attachment, avatar and header locally, which causes a lot of issues since it's the main reason instances run out of disk space). Featurewise it actually surpasses Mastodon on almost everything except for not offering a tweetdeck-like UI. [1]: https://pleroma.social/

I had not heard of Pleroma before, it looks nicely lightweight: https://pleroma.social

You could also check out Pleroma; Mastodon isnt the only microblogging software on the fediverse https://pleroma.social/#featured-instances https://fediverse.party/en/pleroma/

Checkout the more lightweight Pleroma [1][2]. [1] https://pleroma.social/ [2] https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma

Mastodon is one ActivityPub implementation. If you need something you can run on a teacup and string then https://pleroma.social is written in Elixer and seems to run well on tiny VMs.

https://pleroma.social is an ActivityPub server like Mastodon but in Elixir.

I wish more people would self host their instance in the fediverse. Your posts can be traced back to you, your feed is chronological and moderation is back in your hands. Propaganda is a HUGE issue, and I’m sure anyone won’t be able to spot every case of misinformation. But everything could be back in your hands. Nobody can _FORCE_ content on you, you are in control of your own experience. https://joinmastodon.org https://pixelfed.org https://pleroma.social

After I quit Twitter a few months ago, I set up a private instance of Nitter[0], and use Huginn[1] to forward posts from it to an instance of Pleroma[2]. Which reminds me, I need to clean up and publish my Huginn agent for posting to Mastodon/Pleroma. :) (Nitter supports RSS, so you could probably use a regular RSS reader instead of Huginn/Pleroma. But I also configured some other, non-RSS, content in my feed.) [0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1] https://github.com/huginn/huginn [2] https://pleroma.social/

Mastodon and Pleroma are home to many communities filled with people like this! One of my favorite instances, Merveilles[1], is probably among the highest quality in terms of the people themselves and the projects they work on, but there are dozens of others with similar energy. Make an account somewhere[2][3] and see for yourself! Oh, and if you're willing to leave the Web, there's also Gemini[4]. Here are some proxied links to aggregators, CAPCOM[5] and Spacewalk[6], where you can find all sorts of people writing about their intimate personal projects, technological and otherwise (although mostly technological). [1]https://merveilles.town/public [2]https://joinmastodon.org/ [3]https://pleroma.social/ [4]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ [5]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/ [6]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/spacewalk.gmi

Pleroma-link for those too lazy to search: https://pleroma.social/

facebook: https://pleroma.social/ instagram: https://pixelfed.org/ blogger: https://write.as/ soundcloud: https://funkwhale.audio/ At the end of the day, though, the Fediverse is just like any other social network - most people join because their friends or people they know have.

If scaling is the issue, try pleroma. Its based on elixir Phoenix. https://pleroma.social/

The fediverse is already here and more or less offered a working solution to aggregated data abuse. Fediverse instances are mostly crowd-funded, the software is typically open source, and there are no direct paths to placing ads, which disincentivises data collection or selling. The only attack vectors are web scraping, really. It's just a matter of educating the (boomer and zoomer) public, that "official companies" with proprietary services aren't the only legitimate platforms, and that the actual internet isn't 5 websites, but millions of interoperable and bustling websites and fediverse instances. https://fediverse.party/ https://joinmastodon.org/ (recomended) https://pleroma.social/ https://joinpeertube.org/ and many more.

No it's not. Mastodon is not Twitter. Mastodon does not compete with Twitter. Mastodon was not meant to replace Twitter. It was meant to replace GNU social. Mastodon is also not the entirety of the fediverse. Join Pleroma. Because it wouldn't eat your RAM and ignore the ActivityPub spec arbitrarily. [1] [1]: https://pleroma.social

The owner of each instance pays the costs for hosting a given instance. So, basically, domain + hosting. Note that these costs can be really low; Pleroma[0] can be run on a Raspberry Pi 3 or a $2.50 Vultr instance[1] [0] https://pleroma.social/ [1] https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/

There is Pleroma, which aims to be a Mastodon-compatible platform which will run even on a Rasperry Pi: https://pleroma.social It also separates front- and back-end, so it might come close to your „server-only“ idea.

There's already a different implementation of the protocol: https://pleroma.social/