@electragician@electragicians.space cover
@electragician@electragicians.space avatar

electragician

@[email protected]

I live in Ocala FL, in a little house with my wife and a whole bunch of pets.

I work in the HVAC industry for my day job, and I use desktop Linux and open-source software in my downtime. I love the whole ecosystem because I feel it lets me more truly "own" my computing experience.

For additional fun I ride an adventure bike; putting a big, heavy motorcycle in places it probably shouldn't go.

If I take note of you, I will likely follow you. It's what I'm here for :)

#linux
#foss
#motorcycles

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

@ajsadauskas@vivaldi.net avatar ajsadauskas , to random

Okay, help me decide: Self-hosted Mastodon or GoToSocial? What's the pros and cons of each?

Recently, I set up a VPS running YunoHost.

I've been meaning to set up a personal single-user Fedi instance on it, but life's gotten in the way a bit.

I strongly considered Friendica, but it's not there in terms of UX.

So I've narrowed it down to GtS or Masto.

My understanding is that GtS is far more lightweight, but misses some key features. Masto is more resource hungry.

Will I need a relay server for a single-user instance?

Any other key things I should be aware of before diving in?

electragician ,
@electragician@electragicians.space avatar

@ajsadauskas Having just recently err...moved into... a new GTS instance, I can add a few tidbits.

I don't self-host, I pay a few bucks a month to K&T to do it for me, for reasons. That said, I suspect most of it will apply.

GTS can't subscribe to relays. Looking at github, leads me to think that ability might be added this year.
GTS can't join mastodon style "groups", as best as I can tell.

In retrospect, the single biggest help for me to pull content into my instance was to subscribe to tags at fedi.buzz by following @tag-xxxxxx with relevant hashtags I was interested in. You can also follow the main feed of a remote instance the same way with @instance-xxxxxx[email protected] , though I do not actually use that one.

My GTS instance is very performant. I've not had any issues other than running out of disk space once and not realizing it, causing media to fail to load. It's federated to around 6100 instances at this point, and I follow around 400+ folks, with probably 7 or 8 of those being hashtag feeds from fedi.buzz. I have plenty (for me) to read and plenty of folks to interact with.

electragician ,
@electragician@electragicians.space avatar

@ajsadauskas Oh, just to be clear, GTS handles hashtags just fine. You can "follow" them, etc.

Hashtags are best described as "filters" here. If you have the content on your server you can filter down by a hashtag to make those things more visible. It's not a search function though, in other words, if the content isn't already on your server, then filtering by hashtag won't show you anything on a fresh instance. It doesn't reach out across the Fediverse to find those hashtags.

What I do is follow certain tags on fedi.buzz to get the content onto my server, then I use GTS's native ability to filter by hashtag to help me read by content type.

I would be willing to bet the Bluesky bridge would work fine. You are basically following and being followed by a bot user that is doing the work. I don't actually use Bluesky anymore, so I can't really test it for you. Sorry :(