I’m interested in self-hosting a small social network for my family and close friends. Something to get us off facebook/instagram. If anybody is more familiar with the options, is this what you’d recommend?
Like, i’m thinking photo album sharing (twitter-like makes photos ephemeral, quickly disappearing on the timeline) and conversation (twitter threading has never been strong imo).
And as long as there is a docker container, i don’t really care what language it’s written in, tbh - tho that is sometimes useful as a signal of the code quality or other aspects
That's a good point that I keep forgetting these days.
Example: https://freecities.app
Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b
Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.
In short, it's not the right software for a seventy-year-old mother, nor for Gen Z, who are no longer accustomed to using their opposable thumb except for scrolling on TikTok.
https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-experi...
It focuses on Mastodon but that's probably an artifact of when it was written.
So long as they only connect to your relay, they only see each others messages and content.
Primal also makes video and content sharing easy over Nostr.
As for actually doing this... running a PDS and relay isn't that hard, and the red dwarf web client is online and can be configured to point to whatever appview you want. There's significantly less experience running your own appview, but there are options & folks are happy to help.
I linked you a directory of apps already! You could use any of these! You'd have to set up your own instances to use it on a private service but that's doable, and since you'd have the main atproto systems up, it would be much lower lift than you might expect!
PDSls let's you browse people's PDS. This shows you what apps I've used! It's quite versatile, capable of hosting all manner of social systems. There's nothing else that will give you the ability to build a neat rich social community like this: everything else has specific purpose and intent, and you are rather stuck with that design, but atproto is versatile and generic and ready to form whatever kind of social systems you want with it. To look at what's here and say atproto is very twitter like is to barely scratch the surface. https://pdsls.dev/at://jauntywk.bsky.social
I no longer recommend ATProto, in part because the public by default was a terrible choice. People prefer privacy, not anyone in the world able to read all of their activity. Bolting permissioned buckets on after the fact is not the way, it needs to be core to the protocol design.
Use a different protocol.
My take is that (1) public vs private will be an app level choice, and user if the app passes that choice through and (2) this sketch is insufficient for many applications, being on the simpler side of the design spectrum.