gotosocial VS hometown

Honestly if a server allows free login, then it shouldn't matter how the donations are spent, the admins are probably at a loss anyway. I've seen large phpBB forums run on donations for a long time, so maybe federated socials can work too. One unfortunate thing I've noticed from running a single-user GoToSocial instance is that it consumes a lot of storage, I'm getting 8Gb just from myself and the instances I follow. This could be brought down with more agressive cache settings, but it still shows that people using these new social media still have habits from Twitter or Reddit, where bandwidth and storage is paid for by advertisers, and don't realize how many gigabytes they're casually moving around. I really hope this won't be the downfall of the Fediverse.

I'll be starting my own instance of the fediverse, something for myself and family only. I'll start with gotosocial, and add a reddit like alternative too, but haven't decided between kbin or lemmy yet. Maybe I'll add pixelfed down the line.

gotosocial is easy to install and easy to use, but you need 3rd party apps on your phone or computers to use it properly. Another option is snac2, you need to compile it manually but it is easy to use once compiled. Its web interface is kinda outdated, but it is usable as it is. Both are very light on resources, and can be installed on $4 vps.

[2] https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

GotoSocial would be another option (also in Go with SQLite backend.) Although you'll need a front-end because it doesn't ship with one.

https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

Not sure if you only want Mastodon. If not, I am running https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial on a CPX11 Hetzner instance which costs 5.18 euros/month. Am hosting a few other things, but CX11 instance for 4.51 euros/month will also do well.

The main one is how they handle keys[1] which broke federation with Pleroma for a while. There's also some weirdness with their HTTP signing which breaks Honk follow requests but I'm still tracking that down.

[1] https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/issues/11...

Compare mastodon, pleroma, misskey, friendica, gotosocial, pixelfed, peertube (https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial) and their main forks.

As u/riffic mentioned, Mastodon is quite heavy. But since mastodon follows (mostly) standard protocols, you can host an alternative. I’m really interested in Gotosocial, which is written in Go so it can run on a cheaper VPS. But it doesn’t seem to support all features (which will be a common thing with alternatives).

You could try hometown as an alienating server? https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

What I'd recommend is that you ask about this on the Hometown github repo (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown). Open an issue to put in a feature asking for admins to have the ability to restrict all users' posts to local only. I have no idea if Darius, the guy who maintains hometown, will be into the idea, but it can't hurt to ask.

I have a friend who is advocating for something called Neighborhoods. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but similar. https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/issues/1222

Hometown is a fork of Mastodon that adds "local only" visibility, which is what you're describing. I hope that Mastodon eventually adopts it because it's extremely useful on smaller, focused instances.

Hometown - Mastodon Branch

Hometown has two themes (aside from the basic ones that come with Mastodon): fairy-floss and macaron. See here for more info on those themes. I assume one of these two themes is what you are referring to.

It sounds like what you want is Exclusive Lists, a feature from the Hometown fork of Mastodon, which allows you to define certain lists as "exclusive" meaning that when you add someone to that list, they no longer show up on your Home timeline.

Hometown

"By our best understanding, our major changes are not wanted by the Mastodon project, hence maintaining this fork instead of trying to commit the changes to Mastodon."

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown#readme