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Comment by ldjb | Hacker News Reader

The solution is to run your own Mastodon instance. Unfortunately, I find doing so can be quite a hassle. Obviously it's not free, and not only do you need to configure it properly, but you need to handle backups, updates and so on. Even for me, with a fair bit of technical experience, it can be challenging. I think there are significant barriers to doing so for people with no or little technical knowledge.

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> The solution is to run your own Mastodon instance

The problem is that Mastodon isn't really great for single-user instances (hassle to upgrade, slurps resources for breakfast, etc) but there are plenty of other ActivityPub-compatible software that is great for single-user usage, like Pleroma, Micro.blog, Akkoma and more.

I did it with a free VM and wrote a guide here [1]. Zero administration work with docker automatic updates.

[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2023-12-12_mastodon-docker-rootless...

What service did you get your VM from?

Oracle Free Tier

While following a guide can get someone set up quickly, the problem is that they may not have the background to deal with issues/breakage down the road. Maybe it's a botched update, a strange error, or so forth. The security side is also another can of worms and I recommend that people do some reading into this topic before running a public web service.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from writing this - such guides are always appreciated by the community. It's just that I've seen a lot of inexperienced people try setting these things up with a guide and getting bit in the back a couple months later.

Yes, your skepticism makes sense. I am running services since 7 years, so it is not that I did not know what I was getting in.

Thanks. What's stopping someone from creating a .deb that does most/all of this?

I’m paying a coffee a month for masto.host to do it for me. Great little service.

I went to check on the service, thinking about the 1.50€ a coffee might cost here :) but 6€ (+ taxes!) feels too steep for the value I'd get from it. Bitwarden is my frame of reference at 1€/month, and it is the most valuable tool I pay for, so it's difficult to justify 6 times that just for a social network.

I think this underlines the impression I had that Mastodon software is quite bad in terms of server resources consumption, feels like a very heavy service to host. Probably lots of performance improvements are still achievable, and hopefully hosting it becomes cheaper over time.

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