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!
Have you considered bridging your Fediverse account to Bluesky? I used to use Mastodon for a bit, but found the UI to be clunky and ened up closing that account after it became clear Bluesky is THE alternative to what was Twitter.
If there’s anything we should have learned from Twitter, it’s that maybe no site should be the site. But I’ve set up Bridgy Fed and you ought to be able to follow the unwieldily named nev.status.nevillepark.ca.ap.brid.gy, and interact as long as you follow ap.brid.gy.