Hi, i’m curious if any of you have any experiences setting up and using a Mastodon instance for your family/social circle only?
I’m thinking it could provide an experience like the early Facebook, where you saw posts from people you actually cared about. And not just a bunch of ads disguised as content.
If you have experience with it, how did you convince your family to move over to the server? Does it get used and are there any unforeseen complications you hadn’t expected?
I think Matrix or another (self-) hostable mesenger (or even a Signal group) would be better for this since it can and should be encrypted. I don’t really see a use for something public when you want it to be family/friends only. And with Masto it’s very probable that everything your family posts will be gobbled up be secret services, AI companies, Google/Meta etc. Encrypted Matrix would be private and afaik aware, there are no features Masto has that Matrix doesn’t (can post images, text, video, reactions etc).
Thanks for your input :)!
I did this, we used https://masto.host/ and prevented other registrations. You can also make the posts invisible to people who aren’t logged in
You may only want to communicate with your family, but does the rest of your family only want that too? Otherwise you’re trying to convince them to now manage two separate services to keep in touch with you and everyone else.
Would it be better served by a chat group on signal or something else instead?
Good consideration - i know several of them have complained about modern social networks with their never ending feeds and not seeing content from people they care about any longer. So, as the techy in the family, i was thinking it was more or less my responsibility to come up with a viable alternative.
I too am thinking about it, but I fear my family is too far gone with Bellshill accounts on Facebook and tik tok…
Movim https://movim.eu/ could serve a dual purpose for you if you don’t yet have chat which often make sense for certain non-tech-savvy circles. It can be an all-in-one application for chat + posts (short form, long, with media, & now whatever those short videos are called)—& this better mimics how many interact with Facebook. It isn’t ActivityPub, but it is FOSS / decentralized (can join or disable connection to other pods/servers). There aren’t chat applications integrated together with ActivityPub—& Mastodon doesn’t provide E2EE.
That looks very cool! I will look into it. Thanks!
It also functions as a PWA (progressive web app) for those that want those features. The underlying chat protocol has many native clients as well for everyone to have a low-power, low-data-consumption option for encrypted chat, both direct messages & chat rooms.
