twtxt VS gotosocial

GitHub repo

> there really oughta be a text-only implementation of mastodon or one of the other fediverse ecosystems

Something like this that I know of, in a very simplified form.

> twtxt is a decentralised, minimalist microblogging service for hackers.

> So you want to get some thoughts out on the internet in a convenient and slick way while also following the gibberish of others? Instead of signing up at a closed and/or regulated microblogging platform, getting your status updates out with twtxt is as easy as putting them in a publicly accessible text file. The URL pointing to this file is your identity, your account. twtxt then tracks these text files, like a feedreader, and builds your unique timeline out of them, depending on which files you track. The format is simple, human readable, and integrates well with UNIX command line utilities.

https://github.com/buckket/twtxt

I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff PESOSed from Lemmy (https://lemmy.ml/post/47757) to my own site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/14/recyclable-plastic-is...) because I could just scrape the content out of the Lemmy RSS feed and reformat. Similarly I pull over Hypothes.is annotations (https://via.hypothes.is/https://theprepared.org/features-fee...) to a personal wiki where I clean them up into posts for my site (https://maya.land/responses/2021/07/29/geofoam-giant-styrofo...). Sure, if I wanted to update in two places it'd get titchy, but because I'm mainly using these other sites as front-ends to get a canonical personal copy I then mess with, it works pretty well. Hell, I even take Mastodon (https://occult.institute/@maya) and shove it into a twtxt (https://github.com/buckket/twtxt) file on my site (https://maya.land/assets/twtxt.txt). Once you start thinking about stuff with these approaches you can always find a convenient way to duct tape things together.

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).