An overview of GoToSocial: a fast, lightweight, security-focused server that makes self-hosting on the Fediverse easy

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: @elena@aseachange.com.

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.

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businessEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    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”.)

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      7 hours ago

      I think you may have sold me on this.

      I’d had a look at what was on offer and this sounds like the best offer. Yes, I’ve heard people have problems with it but I reckon of I follow the guide and install a Fediverse instance (I’m thinking Hubzilla for a personal space so I can experiment a bit, get my rusty skills improved), it should generate enough usage to not get removed for inactivity but not too much to get me in trouble for hogging resources.

      alwaysdata seems good if you only need 100Mb of storage and feedback is good.