mastodon-android VS gotosocial

Mastodon app is built like that, the release apk is around 3 Mb, ~half of which is resources: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android

Though it's not without compromises — because of Google's stupid policy that "nothing goes into the system unless it needs direct access to privileged or private system components", RecyclerView, ViewPager, and some other basic UI components are still AndroidX libraries that depend on AppCompat for no good reason. I had to fork them to rid them of that dependency: https://github.com/grishka/LiteX

You should file an issue https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android

Mastodon (version 45): Decentralized social network

I love that Mastodon is decentralized. But as a privacy engineer, I was curious about how their app handles our data compared to what they claim in their privacy policy, so I analyzed their open-source app code in my privacy code scanning tool.

We tried to analyze if the actual application code (which is open-source) actually adheres to the privacy policy as declared by mastodon.social server. Therefore, we ran the Privado privacy scanner on Mastodon’s Android application code.

this was fixed yesterday, see this issue in the bugtracker: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/issues/298

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).