Technology

37800 readers

140 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

Los@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

111

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

submitted 7 months ago by GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

@GadgeteerZA it's not really that new, it's been around for as long as Mastodon got the first boost back in Autumn 2022 (at least that's when I first heard about it, something like that). There's plenty of other microblogging servers out there, as microblogging is overwhelmingly served via AP and not only. There's even a Nextcloud app for that.

Check out the list below and sort by Social network (micro):
fediverse.party/en/miscellaneo…

[–] GadgeteerZA@beehaw.org 6 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes not "new" per se, but it is still in early Alpha release and mostly unknown to everyone. Nextcloud and most of the others have been around many years and have had iterative stable releases. I was actually on Mastodon since 2016 so GoToSocial is a lot newer at around 3 years. But yes point taken, "new" is not the best description.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 5 points 7 months ago

@GadgeteerZA Oh, I see. Thanks for the extra info! 😁