A visual guide showing how to install GoToSocial via YunoHost

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https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-gotosocial-part-1-installation-and-set-up/

A step-by-step visual tutorial for newbies about installing and setting up the federated microblogging service GoToSocial

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I don’t think I’m going to be spinning up a GoToSocial anytime soon, OP. But some good info none the less. Thank you for sharing.

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OP

Its perfectly fine not to. If you like the old twitter like interface and folling “people” rather than “topics” (like lemmy/piefed does), then you would like GTS. If the answer is no, keep using your fediverse that you like.

But yeah its relatively unique instructions specifically for Yunohost is what makes this article a good one.

Hope you have an awesome day!

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Hope you have an awesome day!

I certainly hope you do as well.

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Just saying: If you need a step for step tutorial to make something available worldwide, you shouldn’t.

There is a reason why an apprenticeship for sysAdmin (not even going into software engeneering) is 3 years of school and work full time.

Also, as someone who has actually gone into this kinda deep, it is simply not feasable to actively maintain your system for CVEs, hardware and software and still work AND have a social life.

Also by hosting a social media site (its a peer after all) you need to abide by all kind of regulatory shit the moment you make it available for others to post there.

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Cloudflare check. Yak.

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Thank you for bringing this up! This is Elena, the author of the blog https://blog.elenarossini.com/.

My Ghost blog is being hosted by Magic Pages… when I signed up last year they had a fully European stack (Bunny CDN) - something that is incredibly important to me.

Recently they moved from BunnyCDN to Cloudflare to keep costs down (prices had skyrocketed). I have no saying in this, but I understand Jannis and his team.

Magic Pages takes care of all the software updates and offers amazing support (plus it would cost me 2x to self-host it… I made the calculations).

And for the record, my personal website - which I self-host - uses BunnyCDN: elenarossini.com

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Thank you for your reply. But if you can self-host your personal website, why don’t you self-host Ghost?

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Because Ghost now requires Docker and it’s way beyond my scope of expertise (I used to self-host a previous version with Ghost CLI - it will be sunset in the next version).

Ghost is also expensive to self-host, especially the newsletter part. Magic Pages does all the maintenance and updates for me for the price of what I used to pay just for the newsletter integration… and I don’t have to worry about a thing 🥲

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If you have your own server, I can write you a bash script for installing Ghost and updating it when you run the script.

What do you say?

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I appreciate the kind offer @airikr@lemmy.ml but no thank you.

I self-hosted Ghost for almost a year via Ghost CLI and it was (1) expensive (2) stressful - especially dealing with potential DDOS attacks and with the newsletter company Mailgun who handles the newsletter part (and would throw me all kinds of random error messages).

Self-hosting Ghost means spending TWICE as much and investing extra hours every month in maintenance.

With Magic Pages I save money and Jannis and his team take care of all the maintenance and updates and respond immediately if I run into any issues.

Yes I don’t like Cloudflare but I wouldn’t go to these lengths just to avoid it.

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Aha. Then I understand your decision more :) Thank you for explaining.

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and what will handle the breaking changes? and the release verification? what will update the database and the operating system, especially across major versions?

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Didn’t down vote ya, but the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare. It doesn’t seem to be that nauseating.

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the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare
The difference (and the bright side of the Fediverse) is that Fediverse is decentralized so, while some instances can have Cloudflare or similar algorithms (e.g. Anubis) in place, other instances without said algorithms can still interact without having to go through said algorithms. The OC's instance does neither use Cloudflare nor Anubis (lemmy.ml used to use Anubis, but the admins seem to have turned it off).

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

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OP

Does lemmy.world use cloudflare?

Also im confused, is there a reason people dont like cloudflare? Other than eating up caching for the entire internet of course?

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is there a reason people dont like cloudflare
I hate Cloudflare especially because it's slowly becoming a monopoly (if it didn't become already). Webmasters are giving too much power to a single corporation to rule over who can access online content and who can't. Old browsers and privacy-oriented browsers (e.g. Librewolf) are known to be more likely to be refused by Cloudflare, and this is a form of prejudice.

Also, and bringing Anubis to the loop too, there's the lack of user consent. As a guest/user, I'm unable to consent with the heavy computations (and potential damage to my decade-old laptop from overheating) before these happen.

What I mean about "lack of consent" can be better illustrated by the "This site uses cookies" message: it often offers buttons so the user/guest can to either "accept" or "reject". Have you wondered why every website must give these options nowadays? Because it's a literal law. Neither Cloudflare nor Anubis have a "we'll need to validate your browser, do you consent? Proceed with verification / Leave the website". Something tells me Cloudflare, and Anubis as well, are literally pieces of code in European Union, given the lack of user consent, although this wasn't tested in courts yet. I'm not European (I'm Brazilian), but it would be quite entertaining to see this tested on an European court.

Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device. Yes, because when any kind of computation happens, the CPU gets a little warm, and when said computations involve cryptomining-like behavior, CPU temps can raise a lot. And for devices such as mine, an i5-7200U laptop whose fan isn't good (and I can't afford a new one), the CPU can easily get to 90C, to the point of damage, if the computations take long enough. Given a PoW relies on randomness, there's a literal chance that a challenge would kill my laptop if it took several seconds during a Brazilian summer (>42C almost wet-bulb). And I doubt the webmaster would be liable for the material damage their website caused to my personal device, so I've been speedrunning my way to close websites as soon as I see "Just a moment" or "Making sure you're not a bot" as their title, I even made myself an userscript for doing so.

!selfhosted@lemmy.world

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Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device

Unpack that a bit more. What are you using to determine the harm to the device? I understand the concept that heat kills, however, as someone who watches temps closely on my server and especially on my old PC, I can’t confirm that a site causes a dramatic rise in temps. I have openhardware monitor on my desktop that remains ‘always on top’ and I see very little variation from site to site as far as temps are concerned. Just curious as to how you came to that conclusion. Perhaps it’s because I lean heavily on my standalone pFsense firewall to filter traffic.

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Cloudflare is a Big Tech company (first red flag) based in USA (second red flag) and Big Tech are known for giving not popular things like privacy concerns.

When it comes to Cloudflare, they decrypt your HTTPS traffic in order to process the data (a very BIG red flag). And you can’t do shit about other than refuse to use Cloudflare on your website.

But how often will that happen with all the ignorant and careless people all around the world? Very rare! So I tend to just avoid the shit instead.

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People don’t like Cloudflare, I assume, because it’s concentrating your data into one channel. They have control much like a lot of major data centers. So it’s 6 of this, half dozen of the other, and those idiosyncrasies are justified differently by different selfhosters. I would hazard a guess that all major banking institutions use Cloudflare. It’s just that ubiquitous. I use Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust and I absolutely love it. Cloudflare is unavoidable on the internet.

ETA: To answer your question directly, yes lemmy.world does employ Cloudflare.

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Comments in Fediverse@piefed.social

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I’ve been running a bunch of stuff with Yunohost for a while. They cover most fediverse software. I do have some things to add here though.

  1. You don’t need to configure DNS for your subdomain. I’m not going to pretend to understand how this works but I did not do anything and it works fine. Yunohost handles it somehow.

  2. You will need a frontend to use GTS. Yunohost also provides packages for Phanpy (my personal favorite) and Elk. Or you can just use your favorite Mastodon phone app.

  3. GTS is very unique even amongst Yunohost packages in that it provides a ton of graphical dropdown configuration options that makes it even easier to use. I believe this one has first-party support from GTS devs but can’t say for sure because I’ve been blocked by Codeberg for the last several weeks.

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he/him OP

Yunohost is pretty amazing at making it simple to run your own fediverse instance. They have Lemmy, PieFed and more in there.

I wouldn’t use it for anything that would have tons of users because for that you’re going to want to get your hands dirty occasionally to tune it up in ways that Yunohost could make impossible(?) but for an individual or small group it’d be perfect.

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I had set it up once (GoToSocial), but I missed the local part of my Mastodon instance. I think a couple thousand users on an instance that are geographically close to each other is a real strength of the microblogging fediverse.

And now with PieFed getting better at following microblogging accounts, I see no need to set up GoToSocial again. Thank you for that :)

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https://aseachange.com/@elena Excellent article. Gts is one of my most stable fediverse projects. My self hosted solution in multiple years old now.

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