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Comment by kennywinker

9 hours ago

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?

17 comments

kennywinker

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embedding-shape  8 hours ago

I have a forum I self-hosted for friends and family, they have their own login I gave them, it typically have 3-4 posts a week or something, at the very least one post from me as I have a "What I've been up to this week" thread. Seems to work out OK, and is probably as private as you can have something on the public internet.

stevenicr  2 hours ago

Buddypress (free system that transforms free wordpress) - self hosted, is a reasonable option.

kstrauser  7 hours ago

I’d recommend installing a Pleroma server. It speaks ActivityPub and you can use any of the nice Mastodon apps with it. I've run a Mastodon server for the last 9 years, and wouldn't recommend Pleroma over it for a large many-user instance, but it's relatively tiny and lightweight for a personal server. You can configure it not to talk to the rest of the Fediverse so that it remains your friendly, isolated silo.

  • kennywinker  6 hours ago

    Pleroma looks to be very twitter-y. I don’t feel twitter is a great model for a small tight-knit group. For a larger less familial group, it’s probably better suited.

    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).

    • zimpenfish  4 hours ago

      If you were going for a social-media-y experience, I'd not recommend Pleroma (or Akkoma which is the less problematic fork) because dealing with Erlang+Elixir is a massive pain in the arse. You'd want GotoSocial[0] (single binary, reasonably straightforward), snac[1] (haven't tried it but fedimeteo runs a whole bunch of instances successfully), or one of the other small servers (Takahē, bovine, etc.)

      [0] https://gotosocial.org

      [1] https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

      2 replies →

janandonly  2 hours ago

Let them all install Primal and run your own Nostr relay for the family.

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.

conception  8 hours ago

I tossed together a mattermost server. It’s effectively a slack cove and works pretty great.

  • zimpenfish  4 hours ago

    +1 for Mattermost. I set up mine for family but it's ended up mostly being used by my bots for reporting things to various channels via webhooks.

  • throwanem  8 hours ago

    It's been a decade, but I had a very similar experience with Mattermost. It would be, if perhaps not where I would end up today, then certainly where I would start looking.

    • conception  6 hours ago

      Yeah, it’s been pretty seamless and I was able to import the full Slack history into it as well from a previous Slack instance. The only thing I found lacking was a good GIF plug-in, but I was able to cobble one together pretty easily.

jauntywundrkind  7 hours ago

If you also want to host or build interesting social apps, you should definitely do an isolated atproto / Bluesky service! https://blueskydirectory.com/

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.

  • kennywinker  7 hours ago

    I’ve used bluesky, and it’s very twitter-like. That doesn’t seem like the best model for a close-knit community. For larger ones, perhaps!

  • verdverm  6 hours ago

    There are projects that make running independent atproto networks "easy": https://github.com/verdverm/testnet

    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.