I am looking to host a fediverse platform for a community of non-tech people. These people use mostly ig and some still fb. These people are from a network of schools which are ideologically aligned with libre software and decentralisation. It will include adults and also teenagers, who mostly use IG. This is part of a plan of a massive migration to ethical platforms. I am trying to choose the fittest fediverse solution to these, also considering that I am not sure how much my home server will be capable of sustaining, so the platform should ideally be as lightweight as possible. I am considering mastodon, pixelfed, misskey and sharkey, and some people have suggested akkoma.
What would you recommend? Thanks!!
I think once groups land in Pixelfed and the new app is released on the official app-stores, which will hopefully both happen this month, it is probably the best option if people are used to IG and Facebook.
Oh I didn’t know there was a new app coming out, is the original one being rebuilt?
According to the main developer’s mastodon feed, yes.
I wonder if pixelfed is resource hungry? As mastodon?
It’s written in php Laravel, so it should be somewhat more lightweight than Mastodon, but not massively so.
Mastodon also has a bit of an unjustified bad reputation for that… yes for very small instances it is a resource hog, but it scales reasonably well to larger number of users after that initial bump.
Semi-related but I was thinking about this earlier this year, and I was wondering about the feasibility of posting bus cancellations via the fediverse instead of via a bussing company’s website or email.
I think updates like that would do well on Mastodon, it’s the most popular right now so it has a wider reach / support. Similar to what would have been posted to Twitter before
It definitely seems like a good idea for education services, weather services, local municipal services, and basically all important government institutions to make important announcements and updates via a service they can host themselves or is more distributed, like Mastadon, instead of via Twitter where they have to obey the whims of people like Musk.
Frendica
Is friendica appealing for teenagers? does the UX feel modern/polished? (this is non relevant for me, but sadly for teens it is so important)
It depends. what purpose should this platform serve? What functions/features are you looking for? If all you’re looking for is a light(er)-weight microblog fedi platform, maybe gotosocial.
Perhaps a schools network may benefit from an ActivityPub platform that not only allows social posting, but also includes features like cloud storage, and integrated groups (public, private, moderated) among other relevant features. I suggest taking a peek at streams.
Will check out streams. Is it lightweight? I wonder if gotosocial is a good choice for a multiple account instance, as AFAIK it is meant for single user ones
I previously ran a small streams instance on an older 32-bit laptop at home for a couple people. It ran fine. It can also run on shared web-hosting platforms. So I’d certainly say it’s lightweight. Though, of course, it all depends on how much usage it will get (number of people, how active they are, how many contacts on other instances, etc). It can use either MySQL or PostgreSQL for db.
As for GoToSocial, you’re right, looks like it’s intended for no more than a small number of people.
So how many folks are you intending on hosting at this instance?
I have no idea how many people will end up using it. If we get lucky, we probably could even get to a number of 500 or so in some years… Hopefully…
