Setup a Mastodon instance

[veganstraightedge]

Just like #1822 but for Mastodon (Twitter alternative)

Why

Using Mastodon gives us a bit of resilience against a possible future where we get kick banned from Twitter.

Running our own server gives more control and less dependence on someone keeping their server running forever.

Server

Ideally, this would be run on Heroku, but be portable to some other server if we need to move it in the future.

Subdomain

Does it have to run at a subdomain?

I'm not sure what a good subdomain is. Though, I tend to want to stay away from vendor/brand names. For reasons.

Maybe updates.crimethinc.com or similar.

Apex domain

I think it'd be preferable if it could be an apex domain thing.
crimethinc@crimethinc.com or something as the CrimethInc. account + CrimethInc. server.

Other accounts

Probably not open to anyone to sign up.
But maybe we'd want separate accounts for all of the languages.

• es@crimethinc.com
• de@crimethinc.com
  etc

Some prior art

https://ashfurrow.com/blog/running-mastodon-on-heroku
https://elements.heroku.com/buttons/ineffyble/mastodon

[astronaut-wannabe]

I run a closed instance for myself, and it's pretty simple if it isn't an open instance.

some questions to answer would be:

1. do we want full text search or not? Mastodon has a very simple search out of the box. The search will match hashtags and usernames, and that's about it. You can enable full-text search of posts, but that requires running an elasticsearch instance
2. mastodon requires setting up email. A lot of guides talk about how to set up a cheap email SaaS. That said, I don't have email set up on my personal instance, I just marked my account as "email verified" manually in the rails console
3. Do we care about the DB? I don't have DB backups set up on my instance since I don't care if I lose that data in an update, but for a crimethinc account it might be worth it
4. s3. the biggest cost of running a mastodon instance is the storage needed for media attachments. Probably just set up an s3 bucket at first? My instance sits at about 150GB of storage used every month (that is with a pretty aggressive purge schedule of cached local copies of federated media)

[veganstraightedge]

@astronaut-wannabe Is Mastodon a Rails app?

[krainboltgreene]

Yes.

[astronaut-wannabe]

@veganstraightedge, like @krainboltgreene said, yes mastodon is a rails app

[just1602]

@veganstraightedge are we good with the actual account on todon.eu or we still want to create our own instance?