Gerrard Consulting

Given the worrying developments at Twitter, a few weeks ago I decided I should look at alternatives to Twitter.

Mastodon seemed to be the most popular game in town, so I joined a site mastodon.social – apparently the most popular with 500k users and had a look around.

I host my own web servers and thought I might try and host a Mastodon service. The domain tester.social was available cheaply so I thought, why not? Here is the site: tester.social.

After a couple of abortive attempts based on documentation, a new YouTube video appeared with a step-by-step instructions: Build Your Own Mastodon Server on Debian (Step by Step Server Build Guide) With one minor exception, everything worked exactly as described. Today, I changed the site to use cloud rather than local storage for uploaded media etc. – I have a slight issue with some images not rendering. I’m working on it.

If you want to join the site to experiment, like I am – please do.

I’ll add detail to this page as I learn more and decide how far to take it.

If I do decide to continue hosting I’ll create my own YouTube videos to explain how to use it.