Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Argh! I've posted a similar question; basically, I want a private alternative to Facebook, with wall-like functionality. The second minimum requirement is that there be an iOS app that makes posting easy -- including initiating a picture or video capture. So:
I'm not interested in installing and evaluating a dozen different servers, so like you I've been hoping that people with similar goals would narrow down the field a bit. There's no way I'd convince enough of the family to go along with evaluating all of the options anyway, and IME what works fine for me can often fall apart when other people come onboard.
I'd convinced myself that Friendica -- venerable, proven, reasonably popular -- would fit the bill, especially because the design doesn't assume public-by-default, like Mastodon or Lemmy, and the potential damage of exposed content, either through my misconfiguring the server, or some upgrade assuming users want everything public by default, is high. I'd prefer a project where the developers assume private-by-default, and invite-first. Lemmy isn't really right, because we're following people, not communities; Mastodon has a better model, following users, but then its conversation threading is kind of shit for this purpose, and its reaction feature set is anemic. Circles was perfect, and beloved by the key parent involved, until it first made half of her posts invisible to her (and only to her and her husband), and then locked her out. This doesn't surprise me much, as Circles is based on Matrix, which frankly has the worst cryptography management I've even encountered. But if you're saying Friendica is that painful to post media on, then it won't work.
I'm leery of Humhub because of the quasi-commercial nature, and its youth. I've had too many experiences with initially semi-commercial platforms shifting, either suddenly or slowly, to increasingly commercial positions -- moving features from the "free" to the "paid" column. Vendor lock-in is a real issue with a dozen users.
So if Friendica is out, maybe Pixelfed? It seemed to me to be mostly indistinguishable from Mastodon, but if they have better comment threading, reactions, and I need to re-evaluate the AP clients to see if any would be user-friendly enough for the parents. I've used mostly Fedilab, and I'm not sure it's ideal. For one thing, it doesn't have support more than basic reactions: you can boost or favorite, but I am -- and I think you are probably -- looking for something with more variety, like emoji responses, right?
I'm watching the other reactions here, and my post on this topic is here. I may post a summary -- there are comparison charts, but they all tend to focus on feature set and fall short on the overall use case. On my thread,
@acockworkorange@mander.xyz is also looking for this feature set / use case. I kind of feel as if it's more useful to think about this as a use case, because almost all of these projects can claim some or all of the requested features, and yet not satisfy what we're looking for in terms of user experience. This would be a great opportunity for another tool: a wiki with a list of applications & features, but with a discussion section and focused on winnowing projects by consensus about suitability. Again, lots of software that have the necessary functionality and which could be wrangled to do this, but still fail to be a good tool for the objective.
Edit
Probably not the best place to do this, because I'm the only one who can edit this, but:
I deleted the table, as it wasn't rendering on some mobile clients. The table was re-created in CryptoPad.
~~I'll go find a collaborative, wiki-like document thing with discussions that isn't G**gle.~~
Edit 2
The table is now here, as a CryptPad document. In an exercise of trust, it's open to edits. If vandals wreak too much damage, I'll restrict access, but that'll require creating accounts and requesting access, and all that shiz.
Wow, good effort on that!
Honestly, this is low down on my list. Yes, it would be great, but I have had enough trouble finding something that handles uploading videos ok. Emoji responses are not a mandatory thing for me.
Pixelfed is an interesting suggestion. It always feels like it's intended to be public. Were you thinking each user would have to configure default privacy settings? I can see how to restrict to followers but haven't yet found how to stop anyone being able to follow you. I think for me, if a new user has to set up the privacy settings to stop them posting everything public, that's probably not the right platform.
BTW there is PixelDroid as a dedicated Pixelfed app, but it's only on Fdroid.
Thanks!
Agreed: some items are basic functionality that should reliably and easily work. Image & video uploading are among them. I'll add some verbiage on the CryptoPad page about options which have been rejected simply because they don't support the most basic features.
It's funny: I've been similarly searching for a good chat platform, and there are two things which I personally don't care much about, but which a couple of my family members are insistent about: typing notifications; and gifs - as in, a widget where you can search for short gifs from e.g. Gfycat and have them inserted. My wife absolutely requires the latter.
That being said, my position on emoji responses are almost a core feature for a social media platform IMO. They're fast, easy, non-cluttering feedback, eliminating the need to type out some inane, two-word response. It's infuriating (to me) that Lemmy doesn't support them; it leads to such illuminating responses as "So much this!", "Yes!", but worst of all the lack subverts up/downvotes, which should be a tool for designating interest, not agreement. Not having emoji reactions muddies and dilutes any value voting has.
You may be right. I think I read that post visibility was configurable; if I can narrow the field sufficiently I'll start installing them and checking how they work. I do think federation would have to be disabled on any AP server.
Yeah, that would be a blocker.
Agreed. The service must be at least configurable to be private-by-default.
I think I found an iOS app, too... but I looked at so many servers last night I may be misremembering.
The table isn't rendering on my mobility client, so I'm going to delete it from the post; I'll keep the CryptoPad document going as long as I can, but it's open edit, and I'm hoping others will contribute to it.
I agree with you on how core emoji reactions are. They solve many problems and I at times I've also wished Lemmy had them, but given that I can't even find a platform that is private by default and supports a good video user experience. It's clear I'm going to have to settle in some respect.
Is federation or similar mandatory for you? As in, do you want something that allows your users to interact with users that are not part of your family and not on your platform, eventually able to completely replace the mainstream social media? Or is a completely closed platform ok, in terms of it's only your family and friends, and people have to go elsewhere (e.g. back to facebook) to interact with others?
Personally I'm not as wary of HumHub just because of it's commercial nature. Maybe a little, because some features are paywalled. But for example, I use Nextcloud, developed by a company, and trust it more for this task because of that. I use Photoprism, which the base edition is FOSS but they have proprietary extras that you pay for (like HumHub). I use Home Assistant, though I think they recently transitioned to a non-profit so maybe that's a little different, but they charge for a cloud connected component. I use ente, who are FOSS but are a company that charge if you don't want to selfhost.
HumHub have been around 10 years, so they aren't exactly new. Plus as it's extendable, perhaps one day a gfycat or emoji reaction plugin will be added (or if you have the skills, maybe you could make one).
So, in thinking about this in more concrete terms (as opposed to vague dissatisfaction), I suspect what we really want is a blogging platform with robust authenticated reader interaction tools.
The issue with AP, and therefore most of these servers, is that (a) it's expected to be public by default (the privacy point you mention), but almost more fundamentally (b) they're aggregators. People either to a bunch of people and get a feed of a bunch of posts by different people (Mastodon/X); or they join a community and see a bunch of posts by different people (Lemmy/Reddit).
I think what we want is blogging software, with an endless stream of content posted by a single user, but with reactions and threaded conversations per post. I've been thinking how this could be achieved on various AP platforms, but while you can almost get there with groups/channels/communities, the sticking point is that they are all ultimately designed around any member being able to post top-level content. I haven't seen any system yet that (easily) allows restricting posting by individual accounts.
I need to look at pump.io clients, because I think pump.io started as more of a blogging protocol. And the more I think about it, the more I believe a private blogo is a better foundational model.
No. In fact, I suspect it may work against the privacy requirement. I expect that, even if one of the federated servers met all of the requirements, federation would have to be disabled to prevent leakage. Although, at least one server supports authenticated pull (one of the Misskey forks), I'm guessing it's not likely that federation will be needed.
For me, no. I want my SIL to be able to easily post pictures and videos of my toddler niece, and all the family members to be able to oooh and aaaah, and react with little heart and exploding brain emojis, and comment on how the fact that she climbed a jungle gym is a sign she's sure to be an Olympic athlete. The parents absolutely do not want those videos showing up in TikTok.
Ideally, it'd support ActivityPub. I'm not sure how; perhaps through the user creating channels and setting a federation flag, or marking it as public. I think the expectation that people will understand that inviting someone from another platform effectively makes all of that content public, might be bit much to assume. So I think having private and public channels, where public channels are federate-able would be fine. But I'd rather not have federation than have a system where people are prone to make privacy mistakes. Is there an option I'm missing?
Yeessss; I think that's a little different, because NextCloud was forked off of the completely open source OwnCloud, which was well-established and license protected long before NextCloud came along. If NextCloud tried any shenanigans, they'd be eviscerated. HumHub is a bespoke solution, right? So they can't be accused of stealing an OpenSource project's s code.
Yeah, this is a good example. I use it, too, although I admit I've considered, and regularly revisit, alternatives purely because of this quasi-free nature. So much of PhotoPrism is built on free libraries; the project uses something like 120 OSS libraries. How much of their income do you think they contribute to those projects who's work their taking advantage of?
I've been using it for two or three years myself; it's always been OSS & free software, AFAIK.
That's a service. I have no issue with charging for a service, because it's an ongoing cost to the hoster.
Actually, I don't have any issue with anyone charging for their software, either; it's just that I won't use it, and I don't trust quasi-free projects. That's just from experience. Most end badly, either by being bought out and going totally commercial, or just slow enshittification for the non-paying customers.
I write software for myself, and give it away free because it costs me nothing to do so. And I've written software libraries that I know, for a fact, are being used as backbone code for a not insignificant chunk of the internet. I've never been paid by any commercial company taking advantage of my work, and have little sympathy for people charging for software that's 90% other people's freely given code. Which is most software today. You write the entire stack from scratch, including the compiler, like Excel once was? Hell yeah, you deserve to charge for it. Otherwise, you're just profiting off other people's work.
Huh. Never heard of them before a week or so ago. I wouldn't completely discount them because of the semi-free model; I just am putting them down on the list.
I think largely we are aligned on what we are looking for in a platform. The private blog idea is interesting. I normally consider blogs as public, are there private blog platforms?
I don't see it like that. OSS is people releasing their work allowing it to be used commercially without limitation (other , it's what they wanted when they picked the licence, or they would have picked a different one.
On the other hand, projects die when the maintainers lose interest. I would like a platform that I know is going to stick around. That's a difficult ask though, if it's a company like HumHub, it's very possible if the company goes under it will just die. On the other hand, something like Zusam, if the maintainer loses interest it will likely also die. It would be nice to have some confidence in the longevity of the platform before diving full steam onto it. But I guess at this point, finding something that works is hard enough, without worrying about that!
I do have reservations about HumHub, but it's the first platform I've seen that even comes close to being a familiar feel for users. I'm considering the other idea of using Dokuwiki as well, which I guess comes in as being more similar to your blogging idea.
Sure. If nothing else, you could proxy it through an authenticated endpoint, requiring people to log on to view it. But I don't know the blogging software space very well - there are probably projects with built-in support for this. I've started looking around; I suspect the ideal platform isn't so much a blogging platform, but it's designed more around a blog design.
If you come across one, please let me know! I'll keep updating that CryptoPad document. I also started a spreadsheet, which is better suited to the data than a document table, but CryptoPad doesn't have the ability to embed assets from other documents (other than images), so I'm just doing the table manually.
Absolutely. Good projects attract multiple maintainers; there's a bit of Darwinism there. When one project I used was archived, I offered to take over maintainership; the author didn't want to hand it over to me, so I hard forked it and worked with distributions to replace the no-longer-maintained version with mine. It's the OSS lifecycle, right? And the best thing about OSS - if the maintained loses interest, someone else can simply take over. And if no-one does, maybe it isn't worth maintaining.
This is so important! Especially for this purpose. Getting several people to join a platform and then put content on it introduces a lot of technical inertia. That's why it's important for me to reduce the odds of the project changing their terms of use; increasing costs; moving popular, free features to the "paid" column; and other shenanigans.
See, I don't believe this. It's possible the project would die, but so often have popular projects lost their maintainers, and new people step in. They fork it, or have a peaceful transition of ownership, but the project carries on. Yes, some just disappear into obscurity, but the popular ones tend to keep going, sometimes under other names. X11 to XOrg; OpenOffice to LibreOffice; OwnCloud to NextCloud; so on and so forth. And increasingly, many projects add data migration paths from other projects, especially if they're popular. Many ActivityPub servers can import Mastodon account data, for instance.
It does look pretty close to ideal for what we've been discussing; I need to install it and try it out, because so far all other options have failed in some way. There's another forest of options in the blogging style, so I'm still optimistic, but I may try HumHub anyway.
Yeah, that was an interesting avenue; I suspect the user client experience will be where that fails for me. It can't require any technical expertise.
With Zusam, I don't think it's got that much of a following yet. I haven't heard of anyone on a self-hosted forum actually using it. Plus current development is slow (last release almost a year ago), so I do think it would die if the dev abandoned it.
I'm thinking that most of the non-technical people would be reading only, so it might be ok.
At this point I'm thinking of setting up a HumHub, a wiki (maybe Dokuwiki), and Zusam, and getting some of my most interested people in as a trial and see which one they prefer.
None of these options have emoji reactions or gifycat integration, though.
The emojis are something everybody in the family loves, and uses a lot. I don't know that it's a complete deal-breaker 🤷♂️
For the wiki option, perhaps the wiki is just where the posts are made then you share the link in a chat app or something. Then the reactions could be in the chat app?
Or for the HumHub or Zusam options, maybe you could add the reactions/gifycat integration. The platforms seem like they would work well with them if someone would just contribute that functionality.