Socialhome VS gotosocial

That's what it is tho. You create a time-line filter that shows only posts containing those hashtags - is that not a subscription?

There are also more literal implementations for this like SocialHome [1] where you can click + on hashtags you like and public post with them appear in your home timeline

1 - https://socialhome.network/

* in case of a mute, it could also be not wanting their federated timeline to be flooded with primarily mastodon.social posts

Lack of federation between these instances and mastodon.social could be a reason not to pick mastodon.social. (Similar situation applies to mastodon.online btw, which is a spin-off server of m.s.)

Another reason to pick a different instance could be not wanting to use mainline Mastodon software. For example because you want to run your own instance on limited hardware (Mastodon can get a bit resource intensive), don't like Ruby, miss certain features, don't like the front-end (though alternative external front-ends to Mastodon do exist), or some other reason.

Personally I am on an instance that runs [Mastodon Glitch Edition, also known as Glitch-Soc](https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/), which is a compatible fork of Mastodon which implements a bunch of nice features such as increased post character count (Mastodon defaults to 500 characters per post, Glitch-Soc supports increasing this in the server settings), Markdown support (though only instances that also support HTML-formatted posts will see your formatting; mainline Mastodon servers will serve a stripped down version of your post instead), and improved support for filters / content warnings / toot collapsing, optional warnings when posting uncaptioned media, and other additional features.

Another alternative Mastodon fork is [Hometown](https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown) which focuses more on the local timeline (showing posts only from your own instance) with the addition of local-only posts, to nurture a tighter knit community.

Aside from Mastodon there are other implementations of ActivityPub which can still federate with Mastodon instances, such as [Misskey](https://github.com/misskey-dev/misskey), [diaspora*](https://diasporafoundation.org/) (which AFAIK inspired Google Plus back in the day), [Hubzilla](https://hubzilla.org//page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project), [Peertube](https://joinpeertube.org/) (focused on peer-to-peer video distribution), [Friendica](https://friendi.ca/), [Pleroma](https://pleroma.social/), [Socialhome](https://socialhome.network/), [GoToSocial](https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial), [Pixelfed](https://pixelfed.org/) (which started as a sort of federated Instagram alternative) and more. [Fediverse.party](https://fediverse.party/) is a nice way to discover various protocols that make up the bigger Fediverse.

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).