The Pleroma project's blog, announcing releases of its lightweight, Mastodon-compatible federated social networking server written in Elixir.
HN commenters recommend Pleroma as a much lighter alternative to Mastodon that runs on a Raspberry Pi or small VM for a handful of users.
While mastodon.social would ensure you are always on the latest branch of the mainline Mastodon server software as it's the 'flagship' maintained by Mastodon's main/original developer, its large size has caused an increasing number of instances to mute (still allowing their users to follow users on mastodon.social, but not to include its posts in their 'federated timeline'), or outright block the instance (meaning none of the posts on mastodon.social are accessible to the instance's users at all). Reasons for these decisions can include but are not limited to:
- the instance has grown too big and thus some consider it counter-productive towards the federated nature of the protocol
- disagreement with the direction its main developer / maintainer is taking Mastodon, such as intentionally hiding the local timeline from the official iPhone app
- some consider it under-moderated, or not responding quickly enough to reports
- disagreement over its content moderation guidelines
- 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…
Demanding fair play from Google, Facebook and other large corporations is a losing strategy, especially if the government is not on your side. They have too much freedom to rank search results, advertisements and your feed items however they want to, up to the point where censorship is indistinguishable from their algorithms deciding that something is simply of no interest to you. You can't complain if your recommended videos feed is full of "cat videos" and has no political content you are interested in.
The real solution to censorship is federation. We are bad at making decentralized search engines, and projects like YaCy [1] have never been successful, partly because it is hard to make ranking algorithms decentralized. But projects like Mastodon [2], Pleroma [3] and PeerTube [4] already have made federated social networks where you can decide what you subscribe to and receive it regardless of someone else decisions. The technical part is simple and transparent and if your provider tries to censor the sources you like, you can always switch to another one or host it yourself.
[1] https://www.yacy.net/en/
[2] https://joinmastodon.org/
[3] https://pleroma.social/
[4] https://joinpeertube.org/
Mastodon and Pleroma are home to many communities filled with people like this! One of my favorite instances, Merveilles[1], is probably among the highest quality in terms of the people themselves and the projects they work on, but there are dozens of others with similar energy. Make an account somewhere[2][3] and see for yourself!
Oh, and if you're willing to leave the Web, there's also Gemini[4]. Here are some proxied links to aggregators, CAPCOM[5] and Spacewalk[6], where you can find all sorts of people writing about their intimate personal projects, technological and otherwise (although mostly technological).
[1]https://merveilles.town/public
[2]https://joinmastodon.org/
[3]https://pleroma.social/
[4]https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
[5]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
[6]https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/rawtext.club:1965/~sloum/spacewalk.gmi
> How has that experience been? The thought crossed my mind but I didn't know if the effort/cost would be worth it.
It's been awesome, really. I run Pleroma[1], which is magnitudes lighter than Mastodon, and I can comfortably run it on my Raspberry Pi, from home. And due to the nature of ActivityPub, my server going down doesn't mean I miss out on messages/mentions etc. It all federates when I come back online.
> Also, how much of your curated feed is Mastodon-like, and how much is other kinds of content? Been poking around at blog platforms that connect to the fediverse and would love to hear some insight if you have any.
It's all mostly just Mastodon/Pleroma and PeerTube on the occasion. The other stuff doesn't get too much traction across the network, at least from my experience.
[1]: https://pleroma.social
There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in terms of memory & cpu usage.
DB backend is postgres. It's also by default far less cache heavy than Mastodon (which caches every external attachment, avatar and header locally, which causes a lot of issues since it's the main reason instances run out of disk space).
Featurewise it actually surpasses Mastodon on almost everything except for not offering a tweetdeck-like UI.
[1]: https://pleroma.social/
You're perfectly free to run your own instance and post whatever you like. Others might not want to read it, but that's your problem - you don't inherently deserve an audience, you have to convince people that you're worth following.
Luckily for you, there's also https://pleroma.social where they might align with your values[1] a lot more.
1 - I am pro free speech, however many on the right these days seem to think that free speech means they should be free to insult, abuse, impose their religion etc. on others, while also being free to ignore people's right to kneel, protest, worship Satan, support Palestine or whatever else they might want to do.
If that is the sort of "free speech" you're looking for, Mastodon might not be for you, otherwise it's a perfectly free speech tolerant place.