💡 Ever wonder why legacy social is “free”?
Because you’re the product.
OmniSocial gives you tools, not traps.
omnisocial.dev
#YouAreNotTheProduct #OwnYourSocial
0
0
0
0
#
Hashtag
#OwnYourSocial
Advertisement · 728 × 90
<p>Back in March of 2024 I moved my main <a href="https://shellsharks.com/fediverse">Fediverse</a> presence from <a href="https://infosec.exchange/">Infosec.Exchange</a> to a single-user, managed (by <a href="https://masto.host">Masto.Host</a>) <a href="https://joinmastodon.org">Mastodon</a> instance at <a href="https://shellsharks.social">Shellsharks.Social</a>. I wrote all about it <a href="https://shellsharks.com/own-my-social">here</a>. I’ve really enjoyed “owning” my own social in this way, and honestly Masto.Host has been a really great provider. But, it’s missing one <em>really</em> important thing for me, and that’s the ability to write posts that exceed vanilla Mastodon’s limit of 500 characters. Look, I’m just a verbose person I guess, and I really don’t like threading what I want to say. There are a lot of ways to fix this issue, there is the <a href="https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/">Mastodon Glitch Edition</a>, and a plethora of other Fediverse platforms that, especially when “self-hosted”, allow you to change this cap. For a while, I had settled on just keeping my posts/replies 500 chars or less and for anything that required a longer response, I would simply write a quick blog post/note and link to that in my post/reply. But in practice, I really didn’t want to have to draft up a whole formal post/note on the site just to respond to something I saw on social media. There were so many things that I really just needed a <em>bit</em> more breathing room on to respond as I would have liked. After nearly a year running with this handicap, I’ve decided to check something new out. Enter <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host#gotosocial">GoToSocial</a>.</p><h1 id="gotosocial">GoToSocial</h1><p><strong><a href="https://gotosocial.org">GoToSocial</a></strong> is a lightweight, customizable, <a href="https://activitypub.rocks">ActivityPub</a>-compatible social network server. There’s not alot I can really say about GoToSocial actually. Maybe in the future, as my trial of the software progresses, I will put more into this section about what makes GoToSocial special. What I will say is that I chose it because it is A. very customizable, and B. light-weight, and therefore cheap to run/host. Which brings me to <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host#hosting">K&T Host</a>.</p><h1 id="hosting">Hosting</h1><p>In the leadup to me starting up this instance on <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host#gotosocial">GoToSocial</a>, I had seen someone ask about <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2023/08/01/fediverse-managed-hosting-providers">Fediverse managed hosting providers</a> and provided them the list I created a while back. After cleaning up that list, I really started thinking about what software I wanted to try out to move beyond the limitations of vanilla Mastodon. Though I ultimately went with <a href="https://www.knthost.com">K&T Host</a> because of their <a href="https://www.knthost.com/gotosocial">GoToSocial offering</a>, I had considered using <a href="https://spacehost.one/create">SpaceHost</a> as they have a wide range of microblog options including <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host">Akkoma + Mangane</a>, <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host">Pleroma</a> and <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host">Sharkey</a>. I also know a few people who use SpaceHost, so I knew they would be a reliable provider. But K&T Host had the GoToSocial offering, and that was the most intriguing to me in the moment. It also helps that I actually already use K&T Host for my <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2024/05/16/powered-by-castopod-hosted-by-knt-host">Castopod-powered Shellsharks podcast</a>!</p><h2 id="kt-host">K&T Host</h2><p><strong><a href="https://www.knthost.com">K&T Host</a></strong> makes it extremely easy to get things up, running and configured. You can peruse their “<a href="https://www.knthost.com/app-cloud">App Cloud</a>” to see the variety of things you can host, and for any of them, click the “Order Hosting” button to get started configuring your instance. I’ll add here that in my experience with K&T Host, their support team is really helpful, extremely prompt (even at the bizarre hours I tend to message them at), and very knowledgeable about the services they support. On the configuration page, you can configure Disk Space, Memory, CPU and PostgreSQL Disk Space. The starting price for a <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host#gotosocial">GoToSocial</a> instance with K&T Host is <em>only</em> $3.75 USD/month. Incredible value if you ask me for <a href="https://shellsharks.com/own-my-social#benefits-of-a-personal-fediverse-instance">what you get</a>. Scaling up if you want/need seems pretty reasonable too from a cost perspective. I didn’t choose any upgrades, but I probably will need to if I end up moving my primary <a href="https://shellsharks.com/fediverse">Fedi</a> presence to GoToSocial in the future. Set those configs as you want, give them the domain name you want to have your instance hosted at, and they get goin’ setting it up! For me, I think they got it all set up within like 30 minutes of me submitting the order.</p><p>They’ll send you an email explaining how to set up the A records for your domain, you add those records and then send them a ticket and within literally minutes, GoToSocial will be installed and ready to use. You can <a href="https://www.knthost.com/ssh/access-your-hosting-service-over-ssh">SSH</a> directly into your GoToSocial server (they will email you credentials), <a href="https://www.knthost.com/gotosocial/manage-gotosocial-users-on-the-command-line">manage user accounts</a>, and get right to any <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host#customizations">customizations</a> you’d like to do. If you run into any issues, or need help in any way, check out their great <a href="https://www.knthost.com/gotosocial#support">GoToSocial support</a> documentation, or just create a support ticket!</p><p>Some other factoids about the default GoToSocial installation with K&T Host…</p><ul><li>Snapshots are enabled and will run once a day. Seven snapshots are kept. Snapshosts can be found in /snapshots over SSH.</li><li>Database backups happen once a day. Seven days worth are kept. Database backups can be found in /autobackup over SSH.</li><li>K&T Host does <em>not</em> provide object storage (e.g. S3) services directly. But any external S3 provider can be configured and used.</li><li>GoToSocial media is stored in the /apps/gotosocial-storage directory.</li><li>K&T Host uses distributed storage powered by MooseFS (https://github.com/moosefs/moosefs). All customer data is stored that way, and accessed by the compute nodes over the network. The same applies when logging in over SSH. Data is triple-replicated for safety and redundancy.</li><li>K&T Host prices disk space at $1/m per 200GB or $5/m per TB of storage. Space can be scaled up to 10TB per service by default.</li></ul><p><strong>Note</strong>: K&T Host will instruct you to <a href="https://www.knthost.com/gotosocial/configure-gotosocial-for-smtp-email-sending">set up SMTP</a> on your shiny new instance, but you don’t really need to for single-user instances. You manage your user (create a new user, promote it to Admin, delete the default administrator user) all through the command line. A useful support doc for these operations are <a href="https://www.knthost.com/gotosocial/manage-gotosocial-users-on-the-command-line">here</a>.</p><h1 id="customizations">Customizations</h1><p>For anything else you want to do with your <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host#gotosocial">GoToSocial</a> instance, the official <a href="https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/">GoToSocial Documentation</a> should be your go-to place. For example, I really wanted to increase my post character count, so I found <a href="https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/configuration/statuses/">this setting</a>. A quick change to <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">statuses-max-chars</code>, a restart (<code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">touch /systouch /system/action/gotosocial.restart</code>) and boom! I was in business.</p><p>I also found this, <a href="https://ovelny.sh/blog/a-complete-guide-for-your-gotosocial-server/">A complete guide for your GoToSocial server</a>, which has a lot of useful advice for hardening your GoToSocial instance.</p><p>I really haven’t had much opportunity to really dig into more advanced or fun customizations, but as I do, I will try to update this doc/section.</p><h1 id="thats-it">That’s it!</h1><p>Not much more to say! It’s early days for trialing <a href="https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host#gotosocial">GoToSocial</a> but I am enjoying it so far. There’s really two big things that need to clear before I make it my main <a href="https://shellsharks.com/fediverse">fedi</a> presence/software.</p><ol><li><p>I need my favorite Fedi client, <a href="https://tapbots.com/ivory/">Ivory</a> to add support for GoToSocial. They say it is coming in the <a href="https://tapbots.social/@ivory/113760055360044392">next release</a>!</p></li><li><p>I need to migrate some follows and followers to see how well the instance handles the increased activity. I suspect I will need to scale a few things, but I feel pretty sure that when it’s all said and done, it will still be cheaper than the 19/mo I currently pay for my Mastodon instance with <a href="https://masto.host/pricing/">masto.host</a>.</p></li></ol><p>More to come! For now, find me <strong><a href="https://malici.ous.computer/@shellsharks">@shellsharks@malici.ous.computer</a></strong>!</p>
Alright, a little write-up on why I'm checking out #GoToSocial, and how I am hosting the instance - shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosoc...
#ownyoursocial #fediverse
0
1
0
0