Hi, I'm just starting out with self hosting and I am currently working on a project meant to serve a small town that I live in. What I would like to do is host a small social media site from a Rapsberry Pi 5. I'm not expecting to have a lot of people using it so I'm not pressured about the hardware requirements at this point in time.
I have a few questions before I go any further.
-
Is it possible to set up a PieFed instance as text only? I'm not interested in moderating images or videos. Also, I'm also running this from a residential connection so I don't want to affect my home traffic. All aspects of this project are meant to be as minimal as possible to access more people.
-
My ISP blocks ports. I intend to call them soon and talk to them about unblocking ports. If I am unable to do that, my backup plan to simply run an instance that is unfederated. It will act as a message board for my town. Can I set PieFed to a custom port for traffic? For example using piefed.domainname.com:8080 as the address for people to reach my server.
-
Does the registration for new users require any SSL? I'm not entirely sure if that would be affected the same as federation without SSL.
-
Would mail related services be affected by blocked ports? Would I be able to use another email address not associated with my domain name and PieFed instance?
Thanks for any help or information.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll have a look into them and see how they fit my needs. I am looking for something that uses markdown language. I'm using that in other parts of this project as a way to keep things unified and simple for others to participate or contribute.
I don't do blogs or anything but I do intend to make a community on slrpnk.net in addition to my local instance on my pi. The Solarpunk community will focus more on creating a guide for others to create their own local communities and knowledge base.
The ultimate goal is making sure it's simple and accessible to as many people as possible.
Once I set up an instance or some sort of community page, I plan to write up an outline of decision choices and future goals in order to help people understand what's going on and where to begin contributing. I'll be able to use my seed library as a working example.
I am hoping to be ready within the next couple weeks. I can let you know when the Solarpunk community goes up so you can check it out.
Thx, I'll keep an eye out, so you don't need to keep me posted. I'm always interested in the broad topic of making the world a slightly better place with technology, and random nice side-projects...
I agree, such things need to be simple, or they won't take off. Simple to use and simple to sign up. Even coming up with a username and password is a major barrier for the target audience "regular people". I hope your approach turns out well, because from my experience, onboarding a decent chunk of people is key to making a small and more general platform useful. And it's hard.