GoToSocial is a new ActivityPub social network server for the Fediverse

submitted 2024-04-28T13:18:11Z by Andromxda

github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial/

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/13437780

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

Hot Top New

andypiper

"new" == ~3 years old (but looking to move from alpha to beta in 2024 IIRC). It's a good server!

halm

I've been eyeing it for a while, it looks quite mature for an alpha project, and it's really charmingly presented.

phoneymouse

The name is very unfortunate, not just because it’s weird, but also because they will likely face a lawsuit from the actual company GoTo.

https://app.goto.com/

fmstrat

Highly unlikely, too generic.

s4if

It is nice and small server that do the basic well. I once use it on my poor $5 vps while being stuffed together with several of my PHP/MySQL apps. It has small footprint, several of my friends still use it on half-gigs ram vps.
But its lack of features sucks tho, there are no working filters, no disable re-toot per users setting (like on akkoma), and also there are no relay support so my timeline looks bare.
I migrate from GtS for now, but if above features are implemented in near future, may be I'll migrate back to GtS.