Setting up and running your own Fediverse instance is an incredibly empowering thing. A good analogy for it is: imagine you have been renting apartments your whole life and then purchase a home. Your home, where you make all the rules, customize it to your liking and take great care of it because it’s YOUR home. That’s precisely what I have been doing for a digital home - on the Fediverse - with my GoToSocial microblogging instance: @[email protected].
If the thought of self-hosting makes you immediately tune out, thinking: “oh my, this sounds so complicated and unattainable for a regular, non-technical person” well, I can understand. I had that exact mindset as recently as November 2024. Heck, even December 2024. But then I took the plunge and never looked back. I’m here to tell you about my journey of tech empowerment, made possible by YunoHost and GoToSocial.
Its no fun, vps are cheap, you can get racknerd 60$ a year 3 core 6gb, run pleroma or sharkey, slightly funner, or friendica/lemmy, most things are more fun to host but you could prob run goto social on a 12$ year vps to be fair
How do we feel about the idea of reply controls on Lemmy threads? Limit replies to members of the community, same instance, etc…
I’ve always wanted to do this, but I can’t afford a VPS. And everytime I look into self-hosting on hardware at home, I just get the impression that it’s nearly impossible… My ISP forbids it, and even if I can evade their notice, people say having a public facing setup at home is bound to get you attacked eventually
Runtipi plus any vps, easy to setup and has gotosocial (stays more up to date) , or yunohost is easier with more options
racknerd 60$ a year 3core 6gb ram can run a lot, littlecreekhosting 3.50 a month 4core 8gb or 7 amonth 8core 16 (you gotta comment on their post on low end talk for littlecreek or you get half ram)
or free oracle vps , domain is around 12$ a year but porkbun has most domains for half off first year or less, .ing is half off, .buzz is like 1$
I got into webhosting rabbithole like a month ago if it isnt obvious, those are the best deals ive found, hetzner, 5$ a month, pay by the hour, is my favorite for testing stuff for cheap if you remember to delete it, invoiced 3rd of the month
The annual deals good for just not worrying about paying for it and forgetting about it sometimes
Do you have a credit card?
If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.
You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.
And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.
(And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)
It’s not a perfect solution (and I know people don’t love Cloudflare) but their Tunnels project is free. Hides your personal IP from the world, and provides some protection against known exploits.
But a VPS is quicker and easier, for sure.
Self-hosting isn’t too bad. With a properly configured router (not as hard as it sounds), if you’re hosting something like a lemmy instance, the worst people can do is spam you with too many requests. An ISP that disallows self-hosting is a bummer though… having a static IP is pretty essential.
I don’t have a static IP I just use a dynamic DNS. I don’t mess with self hosting fediverse cos I don’t wanna risk illegal content on my server tho.
Yeah if you aren’t down to publicly expose your IP address / port forward, the cheapest way I can think of still involves a several $/mo VPS that just reverse proxies home to a more powerful PC. That’s what I do since I’m behind CGNAT.
I hosted it on a 1€/month vps at ionos. An instance with multiple users actually, and it runs just great. Not a lot of space but hey, that’s 12€ per year
Wow that’s impressive! I tend to be very value oriented, and at the sub $5 price, you’re getting so little that I feel like you’re mostly paying for a public IP and bandwidth. And of course selfhosting your compute is usually a win, especially if you already have something laying around. So I just pay the public IP tax for a reverse proxy and home host it all. I would probably go with a cheaper VPS for my reverse proxy but I need the confidence it’ll hold up to multiple friends Plex streaming.
Your ISP forbids what, exactly?
It is complicated but Yunohost does make it a lot simpler.
Running a web server on my residential connection is against my ISP’S terms of service.
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A VPS costs 5 bucks a month.
I don’t have that… 🙃
Fair enough
I really just want a single person instance so I can not sorry that mods go crazy one day and I can just be a control freak.
