I started my own single-user fediverse server! It’s at status.nevillepark.ca.
What does that mean?
It’s like Twitter, but just me.
If you’d like to see City Council liveblogging, real-time Dracula takes, and all the other short offhand posts I deemed Not Serious Enough For a Blog Post (practically all of them), visit status.nevillepark.ca to read them.
How can I “Like and Subscribe”?
🌐 If you are just looking at the web page, you’ll have to hit refresh (Ctrl + R) to see new posts.
✉️ If you want regular emails collecting recent posts, send this email to subscribe. The default frequency is daily, but the email will include a link to change it to weekly if you like. Send this email to unsubscribe.
If you use an RSS reader, add https://status.nevillepark.ca/@nev/feed.rss. You’ll get a feed of new posts as they come in.
⁂ If you are on any kind of fediverse or ActivityPub-compatible platform (Mastodon, etc.), enter @nev@status.nevillepark.ca into your client’s search bar and hit Follow. You’ll see new posts in your timeline, and you’ll be able to like, boost, bookmark, and reply to them. Unless you’re on a server that I think is shitty and have blocked.
…
You didn’t ask for the technical details, but here they are anyway: I’m running GoToSocial at my regular web host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I am currently writing up a slightly longer article explaining the steps I took, if anyone else is curious. However, NFSN is neither exactly like typical shared hosting nor like a VPS, so it will probably only be useful if you also use NFSN.
There are several other lightweight, minimalist ActivityPub servers, e. g. Honk and snac2, but I went with GoToSocial because of the team’s focus on user safety and privacy settings. It has a very neat feature where you can effectively “subscribe” to another server’s blocklist, or even just a publicly hosted file. (I started off with Seirdy’s FediNuke.txt, a minimal “worst-of-the-worst” list.)
I wanted my own server because 1) it’s been years since I even looked at the federated timeline (populated with posts by all the people that the other people on the server follow), and the server I was on didn’t have a lot of local-only conversation, so I had kind of “grown out of” the need for a multi-user server; 2) I wanted to try hosting a server myself and experimenting with non-Mastodon platforms (my other main server, flipping.rocks, uses the Mastodon fork Hometown and is on managed hosting); and 3) I wanted my posts to be visible on the web (my previous server’s settings made it so you could only see my posts from a fediverse web client/app).
Let me know what you think, if you have any more questions, if anything seems broken, or if you want to try the same sort of thing yourself!