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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yes there is a setting to disable the creation of image posts. Don't worry too much about space usage - after 1 year of operation piefed.social is only using 20 GB for media storage.
For the blocked ports - look into using Cloudflare tunnels aka their Zero Trust product. It's free and very easy to set up. You just need a daemon running on your server which keeps the tunnel open and you configure it all from within the CF dashboard. Just remember to exclude the url "/inbox" from the WAF.
SSL is required but if you use Cloudflare they will take care of SSL for you.
You only need to send email, not receive it so your ISP won't block that. You'll need a SMTP server or AWS SES account. The free tier of https://www.smtp2go.com gives you 200 emails per day which should be plenty.
For more info please see https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/INSTALL.md. Using docker makes it easier but it's still a moderately challenging beast to set up so perhaps not ideal if you have never self-hosted anything before. Good luck!
Thanks for the information.
I have a more questions about account registration/logins. If I understand correctly, they will require SSL.
Before I ask anything, I just want to explain what it is I want to do so it's easier to understand where I'm coming from.
I want to start a seed library for my local community in my town. Unless Monsanto is targeting libraries for heritage seeds, I feel my risk is quite low.
I would like a simple place for people to talk, share information and organize events. I'm also trying to create everything as independent from outside services as possible. The reason being that if any of these outside services experience an extended outage, I can physically move my Raspberry Pi box to central location with local internet/wifi (a library for example) and people will still be able to access all the information. Think of the pi box as becoming a digital community board. In this situation, federation is completely unimportant.
If Cloudflare tunneling experiences issues or outages, can people still create and login to accounts locally? I'm going to assume any disruptions to any email services would also have an effect since that is used for registration as well.
I prefer the Reddit/Lemmy/Piefed style and the markdown language works well with the other parts of my project. It's not necessary and I may keep searching around for something that suites my use case better.
I'll most likely go ahead and try installing PieFed anyways with Cloudflare tunneling(or Let's Encrypt if I don't have to worry about blocked ports) and smtp2go. At the very least it'll be an experience and a good place to start for my needs. I can move on from there if I feel the need to.
Thanks again.
I wouldn't worry about cloudflare reliability. Compared to your rasberrypi especially :p