Hello, I have seted up my lemmy server couple months back and am loving it. One problem I have with it is that I can’t follow individual users so I have been thinking about selfhosting another fediverse service that will satiate my need to follow specific users.
Most popular platform on the world generally for that is twitter so I wan’t to see if there is any good twitter alternative. I know of mastodon but have heard that it can be hard to selfhost and uses a lot of storage ( that wouldn’t be that much of a problem with s3 storage provider, like what I do with lemmy already ).
So I would like to know if there is any simpler “twitter” alternatives for following single user’s on the fediverse, preferably with s3 storage support.
If mastodon is the best in that regard I most likelly will just selfhost it.
https://gotosocial.org/ currently seems to be the popular choice for mastodon compatible single user instances that are easy to setup and run.
Personally I run a https://akkoma.social/ instance, which works fine, but it is a bit more complex to setup and requires a lot of customization to look nice.
GoToSocial is pretty good, but it has some fundamental limitations like being unable to follow hashtags and not having a web client of its own. I currently have a self-hosted instances of both Mastodon and GoToSocial (for testing purposes), but I mostly use the Mastodon one.
If you are looking for a system just for you and low on resources, I’d recommend https://gotosocial.org. Single binary, easy to setup and supports S3 storage.
Based on your requirements, I would suggest looking at one of the Firefish / CalcKey forks. They are ideal for single user or small instances and they support s3 compatible object storage out of the box.
I would recommend looking at Sharkey or Iceshrimp. Both are under very active development and have very responsive developers if you need support.
If you would like to check out an example, Ruud (of mastodon.world and lemmy.world) set up an instance of Sharkey at (you guessed it) sharkey.world.
The Misskey forks are definitely the best UX as an end user I’ve tested out. And I found them easier to set up than Lemmy. But I also found that they caused frequent CPU spikes on my VPS.
I’m not sure if Mastodon does that or not, as I didn’t try running it, but I didn’t have the same experience with Akkoma or Friendica.
That said, I found Icefish’s implementation of the Mastodon API a godsend for mobile use.
The simplest solution to following a singular user is probably RSS. No additional software services required; only a generic RSS reader on your client device.
For Mastodon it’s instance.tld/@user.rss.
If you want to host a single-user instance for yourself only, take a look at gotosocial or microblogpub?
As I understand it, most of the reasons the larger fedi softwares are so difficult to set up is because they require multi-user sign up and moderation tools (I may be wrong about the particulars, but to me it seems logical that you don’t buy a bus to drive yourself to the office and back).
