Hacker News Reader

Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

If I just wanted to host my own instance for my family to post news and updates on would that be a suitable use case for Mastodon?

I realize it can be federated, but just a singular isolated FB/Twitter clone would be ideal.

View on HN

It certainly is a valid use-case, but if you want something that is simpler to manage, look at pleroma and the Soapbox frontend. Pleroma takes way less resources and you'd be able to run on a Raspberry PI.

Another thing to consider, though, is to not run something like a social network and instead just get matrix and create group rooms for your family? Everyone would still be able to share updates and even call each other. Not only you eliminate the need of Facebook, but also WhatsApp/Messenger.

I run a matrix server myself and can not really recommend doing so. It takes a lot of resources and the way e2ee is done is at least questionable.

What is the objection to their e2e?

Yeah, I spent a couple hours today trying to get pleroma installed on a pi4. Pleroma unhappy about the elixir version, elixir unhappy about erlang version. What a mess. Simple is not a word I think can be associated with it.

Yep. There are even settings to require a login to view any content, designed for private instances such as for classrooms, which effectively locks down the instance. That’s how I use it for my family.

It’s a rails app. I love rails (and activitypub), and I use rails for work frequently, but it comes with substantial operational load (postgres, redis, worker nodes, process supervision, media storage, backups, high ram use, etc).

If that doesn’t scare you off, then go for it!

If you don’t want the federation, I’d suggest looking for something lighter.

It’s a little heavy, but I can say it runs fine in a 1 GB VPS, with the addition of a 1 GB swap file to compile the front end during installation and upgrade.

I'd go a little bit further here: I run Mastodon on a 1 GB VPS as well, but I found I had to make the swap file permanent to stop it from running out of memory. It's not super heavy but it is heavy, and even though swap is slow, it still runs fast enough.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com