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FediTips has moved!

Starting your own server on the Fediverse is easier and cheaper than you think.

You don't need technical knowledge, as you can use a managed hosting company. You pay them a monthly fee and they do all the techy stuff, including hosting, installation, upgrades, maintenance etc completely behind the scenes.

The price of a small Mastodon server with a managed hosting company starts from 6 euros a month. You can also make PixelFed, PeerTube, FunkWhale, BookWyrm or WriteFreely servers through managed hosting.

I've done a website aimed at non-technical people which is all about using managed hosting companies to create your own Fediverse servers and personal clouds. The site is at:

➡️ growyourown.services

The Fediverse section is at:

➡️ growyourown.services/grow-your

You can also follow the site's account at @homegrown

growyourown.servicesGrow Your Own Services – A beginner's guide to creating your own little corner of the Internet

@feditips A little bit of knowledge is necessary. You need to know that your Local and Federated timeline will be very empty. ;-)

@Stefan_S_from_H

True, I am slightly simplifying. But the tech knowledge needed is similar to an ordinary end user.

You don't need to be a system administrator to use managed hosting. There are no command lines or FTP or anything like that.

@feditips @homegrown
I took a look on managed hosting options. for $6 you get an instance with 'low federation capacity'
sounds not-so-good, idk what it exactly means, maybe like the instance my friend managed and recently gave up, it was 'losing its federation' as local users said, like people from other instances couldn't follow them, they couldn't follow people from other instances, it was just endless 'follow request sent' even for non-locked profiles? it kinda kills the whole idea
might be okay if you're only going to communicate with your circle of those 5 people on your owned instance but... isn't it kinda killing the whole idea of the Fediverse?

@kaedechan

I use that exact plan from that provider for @homegrown and it works absolutely fine, never seen any problems at all. I have over a thousand followers and none of them have reported any problems either.

I set up the account when I set up the website, so that I'd be experiencing managed hosting by using it myself.

I think the "low federation" refers to the number of processing threads. If you do lots of posts in a short time, it can overwhelm the thread capacity and take time for it to catch up with all the updates.

I've never run into problems with threads though.

It really depends on an individual's needs. If you need more threads, you can go for a higher priced plan, or chat about it with the person who runs the service.

The person who runs the service is really good about this, you can DM or email and they'll give a full explanation as well as offering options. These are small companies that offer the services, so it's much easier to reach people in charge.

@feditips @homegrown ah, so I was in the wrong. thanks
it's not like I'm gonna use managed hosting, I don't want to set up my own instance, I was just curious

@feditips @homegrown

Most managed hosters don't even encrypt your data. It's just running in some unencrypted VM on some unencrypted server in some large Datacenter where your managed hosters has rented servers.

You, and only you should always have the key to your data when hosting your own stuff. Managed hosting usually doesn't allow that, although I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

@feditips @homegrown or even worse it's running in Satyas or Jeff's Cloud.

@lerk @homegrown

It depends what kind of instance software you're running, and what your threat model is.

Obviously if there's sensitive personal data then that should only be stored on e2ee systems, but most of what people do on social media isn't sensitive personal data.

I've gone through all the reasons for having your own server here, and most of these aren't linked to encryption:

growyourown.services/why-growi

growyourown.servicesWhy growing your own services is a good idea! – Grow Your Own Services

@feditips @homegrown hahahaha what?

Social Media isn't personal data?

Are you Mark Zuckerberg in disguise?

And to be clear: I'm not talking about transport encryption (Mastodon does already enforce that), rather about disk encryption and who can access the database of your instance.

@lerk @feditips

If we're going to have a serious discussion, can you please not put words in my mouth?

I said that most of what people post on social media isn't sensitive personal data. (And personally, I don't think anyone should post personal data on social media, I say so on the fedi.tips site.)

The reply you just posted to me has a public visibility setting. That means it will be visible to absolutely anyone.

That's clearly not sensitive personal data, and it's a typical post.

@lerk

As you mention Zuckerberg, you'll notice it's in the terms of service for Facebook that you have to use your full real name and a clear photo of your real face. Sometimes they demand a phone number.

Added to that are loads of trackers that deliberately avoid attempts to stop them.

Facebook forces people to provide personal data to Facebook, even when they don't want to.

The Fediverse doesn't do this.

I agree e2ee would be nice, but Fedi is still a much safer option than Facebook etc.

@lerk

IMHO it's not helpful to take an "all or nothing" approach to self-hosting.

Obviously the most private option is to have a server physically in your own home and install everything yourself, but most people will never be able to do that.

Managed hosting is something that most people would be able to do if they want to.

I'm not saying it's perfect, just saying that for lots of reasons it would be much better than centralised services.

@homegrown you aren't even talking about self hosting.

If I buy a server at Masto host, where do I host it myself?

I just give someone else money, and that someone else has the key to all my data (if it even is encrypted, most of the time it's not).

Do you also call people with their own discord server self hosting? Because they pay money to discord and have their "private" instance?

@lerk

If you are saying your system is more private, I agree it is.

If you are saying everything else is equally bad, I don't agree at all. As I said before, there are lots of reasons why:

growyourown.services/why-growi

Discord is a centralised service, not decentralised. They use the term "server" but it doesn't mean the same thing that it does on the Fediverse.

growyourown.servicesWhy growing your own services is a good idea! – Grow Your Own Services

@homegrown you mean because discord renders it all in the same frontend?

Because I am not 100% sure that having a discord server doesn't give you a separate container somewhere in their cloud infra (afaik they use AWS, clouflare and azure)

@lerk As far as I know, Discord "servers" are just channels. They aren't separate sites in any way.

@homegrown again, I am not talking about end to end encryption.

I am just talking about the disks of the server the managed instance I bought runs on.

Managed hosters usually don't encrypt their machines. If it even is a separate server.

Most of the time you'll get a reselled "cloud VM" that can't even be properly encrypted (like the Hetzner cloud Machines, where you can add an encfs partition which that has known vulns, but not FDE)

@lerk

Storage is one aspect of one privacy issue. I don't think it's useful to imply this is the only aspect or issue.

There are lots of other issues and other aspects of privacy that managed hosting does solve:

growyourown.services/why-growi

growyourown.servicesWhy growing your own services is a good idea! – Grow Your Own Services

@homegrown @feditips yes, but the database of my Mastodon instance contains so much more stuff that is not public.

Sure I can use a pseudonym on my profile. But my email address might contain my real name. I also make mention only posts.

And I think it's really dangerous to give people that don't have much technical knowledge a system that is not properly secured.

Lastly, buying some software from some cloud hosting service is not "self hosting".

@lerk

The only personal data you have to give an instance is an email address and your IP address.

You can obscure the email by using an alias account (which most major email providers have available), and a VPN can obscure the IP address. None of this breaks the terms of service.

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but you seem to be implying that any sort of self-hosting short of home hosting is worthless.

I'd strongly disagree with this. Centralised services are much worse.

@homegrown your account is literally called "homegrown"/"grow your own services" :blobcatwhat:

@lerk

Yes, it's about making your own online services through managed hosting.

I don't see where this conversation is getting us. I give many reasons why managed hosting is a good idea, and you don't address most of them.

Yes storage is one aspect, but please look at the other reasons I've listed.

For example:

Blender had their youtube channel deleted without notice, and they were unable to get in touch with any YT staff to help.

They set up a PeerTube instance as backup.

@lerk

No idea whether Blender's instance is in their offices or in some shared hosting, but it makes no difference: having their own instance anywhere gives a lot more direct control over a social media channel.

Yes a hosting company could delete an instance without notice, but it is much easier to reach staff at such a company, especially if it's a smaller provider. And in the worst case they could re-point the domain name to another hosting company.

This is all impossible on YouTube.

@lerk

This blender incident happened a few years ago, and as soon as it happened PeerTube got a lot more donations and was able to introduce more features.

Being able to control your own services is useful, it takes power away from centralised services and gives it back to the people actually making the content on that service.

The most power is with home servers, agreed, but even shared hosting servers are a lot better than centralised services.

@homegrown I never said managed hosting was as bad as centralized Services in that regard. If the fear of being deleted is the main reason, managed hosting is better. And probably much better than hosting from home as well, because managed hosting has way better uptime.

But you still give a group of semi-random people you've maybe never met the "keys"/access to your data.
Which is imo the most essential step of securing it.

@homegrown and yes, centralized Services are much worse but is that really a good measurement?

Like a politician saying "people in XYistan have it worse, we can leave it as it is"?!

I'd much more prefer if you showed people the most perfect way as their potential final goal and then say "as long as you don't have the technical knowledge it's okay to use this provider but remember that you don't have full authority over your instance and its data"

@lerk

From the very beginning of the site I've pointed people towards other sites which help with home hosting:

growyourown.services/related-p

There's no point in me repeating their work, they've been doing it a lot longer and know more than me.

My site is aimed at people who find home hosting too difficult, and whose only realistic options are either centralised services or managed hosting.

If you are able to use other options and prefer to use other options, then my site isn't aimed at you.

growyourown.services Related projects | Grow Your Own Services Helping non-technical people create their own online services