Hello, I have seted up my lemmy server couple months back and am loving it. One problem I have with it is that I can’t follow individual users so I have been thinking about selfhosting another fediverse service that will satiate my need to follow specific users.
Most popular platform on the world generally for that is twitter so I wan’t to see if there is any good twitter alternative. I know of mastodon but have heard that it can be hard to selfhost and uses a lot of storage ( that wouldn’t be that much of a problem with s3 storage provider, like what I do with lemmy already ).
So I would like to know if there is any simpler “twitter” alternatives for following single user’s on the fediverse, preferably with s3 storage support.
If mastodon is the best in that regard I most likelly will just selfhost it.
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https://gotosocial.org/ currently seems to be the popular choice for mastodon compatible single user instances that are easy to setup and run.
Personally I run a https://akkoma.social/ instance, which works fine, but it is a bit more complex to setup and requires a lot of customization to look nice.
GoToSocial is pretty good, but it has some fundamental limitations like being unable to follow hashtags and not having a web client of its own. I currently have a self-hosted instances of both Mastodon and GoToSocial (for testing purposes), but I mostly use the Mastodon one.
Based on your requirements, I would suggest looking at one of the Firefish / CalcKey forks. They are ideal for single user or small instances and they support s3 compatible object storage out of the box.
I would recommend looking at Sharkey or Iceshrimp. Both are under very active development and have very responsive developers if you need support.
If you would like to check out an example, Ruud (of mastodon.world and lemmy.world) set up an instance of Sharkey at (you guessed it) sharkey.world.
The Misskey forks are definitely the best UX as an end user I’ve tested out. And I found them easier to set up than Lemmy. But I also found that they caused frequent CPU spikes on my VPS.
I’m not sure if Mastodon does that or not, as I didn’t try running it, but I didn’t have the same experience with Akkoma or Friendica.
That said, I found Icefish’s implementation of the Mastodon API a godsend for mobile use.
Yes, I don’t know how I forgot to mention that Iceshrimp and Sharkey both have Mastodon compatible APIs - so all the same apps work (mostly).
If you are looking for a system just for you and low on resources, I’d recommend https://gotosocial.org. Single binary, easy to setup and supports S3 storage.
The simplest solution to following a singular user is probably RSS. No additional software services required; only a generic RSS reader on your client device.
For Mastodon it’s
instance.tld/@user.rss.If you want to host a single-user instance for yourself only, take a look at gotosocial or microblogpub?
As I understand it, most of the reasons the larger fedi softwares are so difficult to set up is because they require multi-user sign up and moderation tools (I may be wrong about the particulars, but to me it seems logical that you don’t buy a bus to drive yourself to the office and back).
Mastodon is a hellavalot easier to self-host then Lemmy, so if you got Lemmy running reliably then Mastodon would be a breeze.
Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol and so do a lot of other applications. Friendica is one that might suit your needs.
Memos is actually quite a nice option: https://github.com/usememos/memos
Just do that. I selfhost mastodon and its not much worse than lemmy. They’re both resource hogs in their own regard. As long as you dont open up user registration you should be fine. Also its by far the most advanced by now afaik.
Well you’re in luck, there’s the Pleroma and Misskey family of apps out there that are ActivityPub compatible. Pleroma also has Akkoma as well, and there are far too many Misskey forks to count. Both of them support S3 I believe.
Update: I have ended up with hosting a sharkey instance, mostly because of it’s very active development and nice ui. ( No way it was cause of the shark costumed waifu )
I selfhost both Lemmy and Mastodon. Lemmy is set and forget follow the communities you etc. Mastodon does need a little bit of tweeking after being setup. I have a script the removes remote content from my server after 7 days which keeps the used space down considerably. More details about the commands used can be found here -> https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/tootctl/#media-remove
id suggest mbin, as it does both (forums:lemmy, microblog:mastodon). im happy with it. check it out, https://moist.catsweat.com
Tnx for recommendation, if I knew of it before I seted up my lemmy server I would hop on it right away. But since I already have lemmy for “communities” I would like for something that’s more microbloging specific.
I could migrate to it but it would get annoying for a couple friends that already use my lemmy instance.
EDIT: I might self hostcit to try it and see how wellcit work’s tho.
My experience using the *bins has been that they provide a superior community UX, but the microblogging end of things feels very rough and under-invested in. It’s a value-add that doesn’t integrate well, or add real value.
There’s a ton of potential there for cross-posting, but it’s totally unrealized.
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The simplest solution would be to use a Nostr app to create a keypair (aka account). Then add the Mostr.pub relay. This will let you search for ActivityPub users and follow them as if it were a Twitter-style feed.
