I'm ready to completely jump in to using decentralized, federated platforms, however most people I know aren't fully there. It strikes me that this moment in time, where a lot of people are newly actively aware and frustrated by Meta and Twitter's actions, is ideal to get people to switch over to new platforms.

To encourage people in my community to join platforms on the Fediverse, I want to host instances of various platforms (probably Mastodon and Pixelfed to start with). Having a specific instance on these platforms to point people towards would probably help a lot of the folks I know get on board.

However, I'm scared I'm not knowledgeable enough to admin these public instances for others. I know some basic networking, I self-host a bunch of stuff with Docker on an old laptop, and I definitely am smart enough to figure out how to start up instances of these platforms. However, I'm mostly concerned with whether I'd be able to properly maintain and secure these instances. I wouldn't want people to be soured on decentralized social media just because I don't know what I'm doing.

Any thoughts, words of encouragement, tips, warnings, etc. are welcomed!

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[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

There are some self-help chats (usually on Discord, IRC or Matrix) with other admins that you should join to get a feel of what typical problems arise and how to fix them. But it is usually not that much of a deal and you seem to be already on a good way.

Specifically for ActivityPub and other federated services it is important to know that even if there are only few people using your server the remote federated activities can have a quite significant impact on the performance of your server and RAM/Storage requirements.

Remote federated servers also usually "remember" who they talked to via special cryptographic keys and so on, meaning that if something goes wrong for some reason it might not always be possible to just delete everything and start new from scratch on the same domain as the remote servers will refuse to talk to your "new" server. Just something to keep in mind and another reason why backups are important.