Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world limonade @jlai.lu 1 mo. ago

What fediverse software should I host?

I'm looking into hosting my personal instance of some fediverse software. I want to do it to grow my tech-literacy more than to host my own service. So I want to pick one in the fediverse, because I love the federation concept, but I'm open to a software I don't use yet.

I have made previous attempt at hosting internet services a few years ago, mainly things my teachers told me to do. It was a big failure and I mostly remember from it that I got a hard time understanding instructions given on internet tutorials or at which point what I did was different from what my classmates did :( But I want to try again and do better! 😤

I plan on hosting it on a old laptop I hope not to break completely and maby in a docker container (but I also used to have a hard time with docker)

What fediverse software would you recommend me? Is there one that is easier to install than another? Or one with more clear installation instructions?

Thanks for your advice!

12 comments

One important thing to check up on before you start is weather your ISP permits hosting servers at home to not.

Any port you open in your router will quickly be found and you WILL get attacked, this is automated and often called the background noise of the internet.

Your IP WILL show up on sites like Shodan, and depending on your ISP they may also find it. You need to read up on what your ISP permits you to do with their internet connection.

Normally it is chill, as long as you don't cause issues for the ISP they don't really care, but if your service starts attracting traffic, attack will increase and so might the issues your ISP see.
- I don’t think anyone opens a port directly to the application. One should use a reserve proxy manager such as NPM. Further security such as authentik. And maybe even cloudflare proxy for hiding one’s IP.
  
  Also, what ISP cares about hosting other then frequent IP changes which duckdns solves? Is this for a specific company or country?
  
  I don’t think anyone opens a port directly to the application
  
  Well, I don't really know what I'm doing so it may be pretty important. I will look for reserve proxy manager. Thank you for helping (^_^)
- Thanks. I did not think of that.
This is probably the least painful way to get a few fediverse apps installed. There are many Mastodon type apps, Pixelfed, Lemmy and maybe more.

https://yunohost.org
- oh wow, their app library is huge.
  
  It’s come a long way.
  
  It also has a lot of fediverse software
- This looks super cool. I will look at that very carefully. Thank you!
I've self-hosted Pleroma, Hubzilla, Mastodon, and Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin. I found Pleroma to be the easiest of those.

I think I'd recommend Akkoma today; it's a fork of Pleroma.
- Thank you. I will try Akkoma then.

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