Mastodon

aka mastodon.social, wikipedia says, “Mastodon is a federated social network, with similar features to Twitter, but administrated as a decentralized federation of servers running open source software.” Can we build a “club” using this? Here are my notes which focused on my failed attempts in building an instance. …

My original interest was to see if by building a server, one could curate communities … it seems not. It’s not how mastodon works.

Some Links

1. How it works at joinmastodon.org
2. On the relationship between ostatus pump-io and activitypub. none really, but an article at stackoverflow
3. Mastodon is dead in the water, well maybe, maybe not, an essay suggesting that federation is a dead end, it also look at the code history.
4. Awesome Mastodon, a wiki hosted on github.
5. Running Mastodon, a production guide at github.com/tootsuite, optimised for Ubuntu 16.04, not sure why this isn’t lower in the page.

About clients

I use mastopane and twidere on android, and found tootle for elementary os i.e. ubuntu.

I installed tootle on elementary OS (0.4.1) using the AppCenter package manager. When you launch tootle for the first time, using a text box widget it asks you for the instance you use, and then uses a web browser tab to login to your mastodon account and authorise the application. The web form will expose one of the thee keys which you need to cut and paste into the code text box in the tootle login window. (If you’ve forgotten  your password, this stage becomes very difficult. 😣)

About Hosting

1. https://anystack.xyz/how-to-install-mastodon-ubuntu/
2. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-network-set-mastodon-instance-linux/
3. Installing on an AWS instance, from Github

Install on VBOX

1. https://anystack.xyz/how-to-install-mastodon-ubuntu/
2. https://hostpresto.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-mastodon-on-ubuntu-16-04/, this looks good, no email required
3. https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/exim4.html
4. https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/serverguide/exim4.html
5. https://gridscale.io/en/community/tutorials/hostname-fqdn-ubuntu/
6. https://serverfault.com/questions/281431/how-do-i-install-rake-ruby-on-rails

I have tried to install in Vbox using the instructions above and it fails making cld3, I don’t have the gem and make skills to fix it and I can’t find a crib sheet.

"pkg-config --exists protobuf"
package configuration for protobuf is not found

Or is this it? It seems not!

A correspondent writes …

I had to install libprotobuf-dev in addition to protobuf-compiler

Let’s try this

1. https://github.com/ummjackson/mastodon-guide/blob/master/up-and-running.md with mailgun and docker

In 2021, I had another look and found these,

1. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/social-network-set-mastodon-instance-linux/
2. https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/