Hacker News Reader

I self-host a number of products for use between myself and a small group of friends. I like the idea of Mastodon, but due to its requirement of needing an email server, it's honestly more trouble than it's worth to try and host it myself.

View on HN

If you are self-hosting for yourself, you can make-do without an e-mail server. You'd have to create an account from the command-line (`tootctl accounts create aquova --email=you-login-with@this --confirmed`) and turn on TOTP 2FA once you login for the first time to avoid e-mail based security challenges. For personal use, you won't need any other e-mails.

You could always go the barebones route and generate a mailto: link which contains all the info in the email that you usually send (in text mode of course) but which the admin can send from their personal account with their personal email client.

I am using a similar implementation in another fediverse project. Another example is/was AWS manual account creation.

I think you can just make Mastodon send e-mails through your GMail account if you're going that route.

You can self host pleroma, no email server required, it federates with activitypub so it's on the same network as mastodon and federates with it. I used to host a server a while back, it was pretty straightforward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com