Image Credit: fullvector @ freepik

I don’t want this post to become solely about the web development or technical aspects of hosting my own fediverse instance (honestly my posts have all been about webdev stuff recently due to taking a break from my other hobbies due to my elbow injury ). But I did want to bring it up since last night I decided to take the plunge and host my own fediverse server!

I’ve been mulling over this idea for quite a long time. I joined Sakurajima.moe in January 2023, after exiting twitter and having a brief stint at a different mastodon server. It’s a great place for anyone interested in Japanese or other asian media, and it has relays with other servers with similar vibes, like Blorbo.social, Sakurajima.social (run by the same owner as Sakurajima.moe), and Urusai.social. Just from posting about my normal interests, I met many like-minded mutuals with whom I enjoy chatting and socializing with.

Overall it’s been a great experience, and Admin Chikorita157 spends a lot of time on other projects that benefit the community like mirroring industry accounts or making wordpress hosting available to members. It’s a great place, and I have zero qualms with the way it’s run.

So then why did I choose to host my own instance with Hollo? Well I honestly felt like I was taking advantage of the great services that were being provided. I’ve touched on it in a previous blog post, but I use mastodon as a comments engine for my blogs. So I ping the server every time I rebuild the site in order to retrieve comments, which I felt kind of bad about.

Another reason is that I’ve been reading other people’s takes on running a single user instance ^{1 2 3 4 5 6 78}. There are lots of talented I.T. professionals on fediverse since it started as such a technically-oriented space, and just as they sparked my interest in hosting my own blog on an SSG with static hosting, this felt like the next step.

Due to the various blog posts that I’ve read, I’ve been highly interested in having my social microblogging take place at a domain that I “control”. Even though I am renting both the VPS and the domain, I wanted to see how hard it was, and if it could be done relatively cheaply.

I first started out with researching mastodon, but I realized that it was not a good idea due to how expensive it can be. There are several managed hosting providers for mastodon like FediHost and Masto.host. The prices seem quite reasonable to start, but I saw several people say that the two biggest issues for mastodon hosting are the cached media storage and the memory/RAM. Mastodon caches a lot of media from remote servers, and also uses quite a bit of memory (more than 4GB) for certain processes. It’s not very lightweight, and can be sluggish if you don’t have any surge capacity.

Due to all of these factors, I was convinced that I needed to find another fediverse/activitypub software that has compatibility with mastodon API, so that I can continue to use it for blog comments. The main contenders from my research were: Akkoma, GoToSocial, Snac2, and other niche solutions like honk⁹ or microblog.pub.

Sorry to bury the lede here, but I didn’t end up going with any of the options above. While I was scrolling through the explore tab looking for other’s hosting experience with single-user fedi, I found two interesting options that I had never of before: Holos and Hollo. I actually found Holos first, but when I was searching up others who had used it, Hollo popped up in the search since it was a similar name.

Hollo seemed to be exactly what I wanted: lightweight, mastodon API, and a nice UI design. Now I just needed to install it. I ended up going with Hetzner Cloud CX33 VPS, since it was pretty affordable for the specs, and I could use the extra capacity for other projects like FreshRSS.

Setup took a couple of hours because I’m not at all experienced with linux, using docker containers, or terminal commands, but I managed to power through it with some documentation and also help from Gemini. I hate to rely on AI, but it truly was helpful to have it give step-by-step instructions on how to accomplish some of the steps listed in the official documentation.

It feels weird and interesting to be one of only 32 people currently running the Hollo fediverse software. I’ve already run into some complications so it definitely wasn’t easy. I know managing your own server through terminal commands is pretty daunting, but following the steps and looking up things when it didn’t work was basically my main process. It was frustrating, but rewarding.

I didn’t end up migrating my Sakurajima mastodon account over because I still want to interact with the local timeline there. But I did import follows, so I can start using my hollo accounts right away.

The first real test will be if it works as a comment system for this post!