I'm ready to completely jump in to using decentralized, federated platforms, however most people I know aren't fully there. It strikes me that this moment in time, where a lot of people are newly actively aware and frustrated by Meta and Twitter's actions, is ideal to get people to switch over to new platforms.

To encourage people in my community to join platforms on the Fediverse, I want to host instances of various platforms (probably Mastodon and Pixelfed to start with). Having a specific instance on these platforms to point people towards would probably help a lot of the folks I know get on board.

However, I'm scared I'm not knowledgeable enough to admin these public instances for others. I know some basic networking, I self-host a bunch of stuff with Docker on an old laptop, and I definitely am smart enough to figure out how to start up instances of these platforms. However, I'm mostly concerned with whether I'd be able to properly maintain and secure these instances. I wouldn't want people to be soured on decentralized social media just because I don't know what I'm doing.

Any thoughts, words of encouragement, tips, warnings, etc. are welcomed!

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[–] tofuwabohu@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If you're selfhosting already, you know how to deploy it. Are those services available in the internet via some domain? Having an SSL certificate with automated renewal is quite important. Make sure to update the machine the service runs on regular.

Backups! Having daily snapshots to be able to roll back if necessary is great. If you want to use your own hardware, I suggest Proxmox. If you want to rent a VPS, see if the cloud provider has something like that as well (will likely cost a little extra). Also, check the service's documentation on what data to back to in order to be able to restore on a new machine in case your server explodes. (3-2-1 rule). Shutting down the instance with no prior warning because of some error you can't recover from because of no working backup is the best way to spoil anyone's experience.

If you use docker, make sure to have it behind a reverse proxy and configure your docker ports to be bound to localhost only so you don't accidentally expose your database to the internet.

Think not only about technical deployment but also governance. Set instance rules and think how you want to do moderation. See if you have someone to help you with that.

Go for it! Set it up, fiddle around for a while and when you get comfortable, invite your friends. Just be upfront that there might be an occasional downtime for maintenance (which you will advertise a day before or so) every now and then.

[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

None of my selfhosted stuff is available to the public internet, I run everything through Wireguard. However I do know how to get SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt because of previous messing around.

Backups is definitely something that I'm lazy about with my selfhosting that I'd need to address for a public service. I currently just manually copy over the few essential files I have to my server, my desktop and my phone. If I commit to hosting stuff for others, proper backups are definitely at the top of the priority list.

Governance is something I've already thought a lot about, since these services would be aimed at a specific minority community.

Thanks for your comment! I'm currently messing about with Hugo to build a landing page to explain decentralized, federated servers and link to services I might host in the future. I really want to do this, I don't want to just accept that the common communication platforms are controlled by American fascists.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 4 days ago

Feel free to hit me up if you need some assistance with setting it up, I can help with the initial setup, making sure it's secure and setting up backups.