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GoToSocial is a new ActivityPub social network server for the Fediverse (github.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This service is still in Alpha release but is already deployable and usable, and federates with other Fediverse servers.

However, there is no "main" instance you go to join. The intention really is that you host your own instance for yourself and a few friends and family. To this end, it is designed to be very lightweight and will happily run on a Raspberry Pi or even a $5/pm VPS.

This is taking a very different approach from say Mastodon which has one main instance everyone could join, but then it sits with the issue that everyone joins there, and it becomes a bit "centralised". GoToSocial has been designed as lightweight for self-hosting, and also has a Docker image installation, so it makes it really easy for (and encourages) most people to host their own instance.

It seems to also be focussed very much around privacy (defaults to unlisted posts) and permission controls (for example, you have an option to post to mutual-only where both people follow each other). Also, by hosting your own service you set the rules, and you are also your own admin. You can choose to turn off likes, replies, boosts, etc as well. Being your own admin also means you can easily adjust the post length as well.

It does conform to the Mastodon API so apparently some Mastodon clients will also work fine with it.

See https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/

#technology #ActivityPub #GoToSocial

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 months ago

There are no platforms on the Fediverse that do that. There are servers that are refusing and will refuse to communicate with other servers, and that's their right. If you don't like their policies, you can pick a different server.

Your power as a user is to select your administrators, by selecting whose server you want to log in to. You don't get to decide whose content they mirror. If they don't want to host content from Meta, or from Mastodon.social, or from anywhere else, they don't have to, and you shouldn't be able to force them to.

This isn't a mainframe and client system. There's no "fediverse" server out there that the different instances are gating. There's just 10 thousand partial mirrors, each offering local access to that mirrored content.

If you want complete and total control over what content is being hosted where ever you're logged in, host your own server. That's your other option.