Grow Your Own Services 🌱

The more technical self-hosters out there may be interested in this blog post about how @stefano created a global Fediverse weather service using a €4 VPS:

➡️ https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-service-for-thousands

You can find FediMeteo's website at https://fedimeteo.com and follow updates from the service at @admin

#Fediverse #SelfHosting #Weather

Do you use a custom domain name for your email address?

Have you noticed any additional difficulties with using newer top level domains compared to the old traditional ones? Or has it made no difference whether you use newer or older TLDs?

(Newer TLDs would be things like .social or .pizza or .world, older TLDs would be .com or .org or .net)

Asking as there seem to be conflicting reports about how much email is affected by the choice of TLD?

#Email #SelfHosting

The video I just boosted (https://video.fedihost.co/videos/watch/9cf467b1-7b24-4f5f-846a-151822b0fcbc) does a really good job of summing up the pros and cons of managed hosting vs VPSes.

Managed hosting doesn't get as much limelight as VPSes, which is a shame as managed hosting opens up this whole area to non-technical people.

Sometimes people assume that everyone can use a VPS, but for a lot of people it isn't really sustainable as it requires a commitment to fiddling with the techy stuff behind the scenes when it goes wrong.

#SelfHosting

Hey Mastodon admins, do you want to allow your users to invite people to join your server? The setting for switching this on is now here:

Preferences > Administration > Roles > Default Permissions, tick the box marked "Invite Users", click "Save Changes"

(I had to look this up on the Github as it was so buried 😅 )

#MastoAdmin #FediAdmin

If you're wanting to quietly advertise your Mastodon server for people to join but you don't want to open it completely, you can keep your sign-ups closed but still have invitations active.

You can generate invitations for people to join your server by going to ⚙️ Preferences > Invite People, then choose your settings and let people know the link. (If you change your mind later you can deactivate the link.)

#MastoAdmin

If your #email provider has done something unacceptable, you might consider switching to another one, but this might mean telling all your contacts to update your address.

You can avoid this problem by creating your own domain name and using it with your favourite email provider. If they ever do something bad, you will be able to switch to another provider without having to change your email address.

There's a beginner's guide to making your own domain name here:

🌱 https://growyourown.services/a-beginners-guide-to-creating-and-using-your-own-domain-name