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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by Evkob@lemmy.ca to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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[-] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 week ago

Would you simply host for yourself or for others?

The issue I have with self-hosting is that the day something goes wrong, you lose your account along with all your posts. And if you host for others, they also lose all of theirs.

I know this isn't the answer you were looking for. But I have the knowledge to self host and all. I have 17 years of experience as a Linux sysadmin, a software developer and now a DevOps specialist. And I honestly don't want to bother because of the responsibility. However, there are organizations and non-profits who have the resources to host stable long-running instances. But they need money. So I donate to the instances I use instead.

But it you REALLY want to learn, start learning about Linux web servers, databases, networking, containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes) and a good bit of cybersecurity. Hosting stuff on your laptop is a good start.

this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
54 points (98.2% liked)

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