The issue with Mastodon, and pretty much most of the fediverse is that the non techy people do NOT want to choose a server, they just want something to work…
Once you throw in a lot of the positives us people see, it turns it into a negative for them, they have no need or want for decentralisation and they simply don’t sign up.
Damn the wife WILL be pissed
UK here so unless I change my country I can’t use it ;)
Well erm yeah… seems to have gone quiet. Cloudflare is a weird beast at times… mind you I’m in the UK which is way weirder!
I have to say that I might be the one here to say something different, but I still use Cloudflare tunnels because I have been with them for so long. I know lots of people hate them, for various reasons, but in this simple example, cloudflare will have many people who have used it, and it really just kinda works. So for getting started, it probably will be easier and quicker… A free account is good enough, will make the services available easily, and is secure enough for most people within reason. Once you are up and running you can change it moving forward.
Forgot to add - Cloudflare also acts as a CDN meaning a slow internet connection isn’t as bad as it could be. This is another reason I like it - it’s free and does help out if you have a slower connection. It isn’t a fix all solution, you still need to ensure that you are protected as well as you can be, have certs, use https, lock the server down as much as you can. Use fail2ban or something similar to stop brute force attacks… do as much as you can to help yourself. But it is easy to use to get you on your way to self hosting, which for me is a win.
Now this I like, just because I have plenty of people who really aren’t techy enough and dislike a lot about the fediverse… I know it’s not for everyone but having a simple front end works for loads! Good work here - I like it, I like it a lot
I run an SMTP relay… very few takers, most just pay for managed email hosting. I run an smtp relay so multiple wordpress sites and services I self host can send mail. My lemmy instance is one
If you want the easy way consider Cloudflare and a tunnel. You can set it up in various ways but one way is to have a public hostname which can be a sub domain and then point it at your server. You’d have to have the DNS/domain at least use Cloudflare nameservers though for that. This is really easy to do - and you can move on to other ways later if you wish. Tailscale is another way, but Cloudflare will also act as a very good CDN/cache without much tweaking on your part. I have used Cloudflare for ever so I do still use tunnels - never seen the need to change yet. In fact my lemmy instance is cached/proxied through a cloudflare tunnel
but it the most well known…
of course… but plenty are. When you see kids at school saying they want to be content creators as a job you know it is only going to get worse. I never said it was right or wrong but it is exactly what it is for a large percentage of people. Also can’t get past the fact that like googling something, watching a video on youtube is literally in peoples vocabulary
but after youtube has taken it’s cut and share of the creators there isn’t much left. This is the chicken and egg situation
you can’t really… being federated and no ads kinda ruins that idea as it is hated by many
I have to say I think Peertube itself is good, but the content still isn’t there yet. Of course we all know that’s because there isn’t cash to be made on Peertube
Gotta be better than being tracked everywhere… and of course I personally use a vpn (and encrypted traffic to the server)
Nextcloud has been a pretty good switch but it is getting unwieldy and a swiss knife with a million tools. Run my own email server switched from gmail, but it is a pita VPS server is contabo - not the best but pretty cheap and is European - never really looked into how european they are though and they have US datacenters
It is also about confidence which is a real short term thing. First thing I was taught in Economics lessons was governmental policy and fiscal policy rely on confidence - a no-confidence vote is exactly how most governments fail, the same is true of how a fiscal policy pans out. One bad decision can ruin confidence and bingo we are looking at a crisis
for future reference there are a few ports that need to be open for let’s encrypt to work, and it has a very small timeout (as you have found) so if the dns isn’t great it fails. Cloudflare will cache your site/dns so usually works
I take it back. Funkwhale is working again… Discourse is gone for ever though as Discourse themselves only want docker installations moving forward
To move your photos from google I recommend Immich. Is available as a docker container, or yunohost though don’t use the official yunohost version there is a better version that supports HEIC and some other formats. You can find that here though
https://codeberg.org/Loowiz/immich-docker_ynh
It is still easily installed using yunohost but upgrades are manual
Facebook = the old bar that pretty much everybody used to go to, you know the one where the bar person tells everybody your business and there is always someone trying to sell you stuff…
Mastodon is that new place in town, but most people don’t go really. It’s cheap, nobody tells you what to do but most fo your mates still don’t go there…
X is that club that’s loud, people shouting all the time, trying to get your attention. It’s where you go if you want a wild night and break a few rules