I am a ~single-user Mastodon instance admin. It is a big hassle to get set up, but then I never have to really think about it day-to-day.

That said, there are also a lot of other good instances, and I am jealous of folks with a nice local timeline, so the general advice (for anyone else reading) would be to just move instances.

I don't know if this has an ergonomic read-posts-from-other-instances setup. If you try it, write up what you think somewhere? :)

It probably depends on how it is packaged. I easily deployed it on yunohost, and the updates are done with a few clicks. I do hardly anything to keep it maintained on a RPI. If I start bringing on more people, I might have to actually moderate.

hosting a full-blown mastodon for a single user instance is extremely overkill.

if you have access to a LAMP like your typical shared hosting provider, you could try Gnu Social or WordPress with the AP plugin.

Is there such a thing as a static ActivityPub timeline, something like Hugo, by compatible with Mastodon? Or is that nonsensical?

There's a discussion about that here involving one of the spec authors:

https://octodon.social/@cwebber/100368138697354408

It's not nonsensical. It's not doable, though, either—owing to fundamental assumptions/flaws in the protocol (where "protocol" here refers to the Mastodon-compatible implementations that are in actual [read: majority] use today).

It wouldn't take much to fix it, though, and it should be fixed. TPTB really should have focused on enabling your use case from the beginning.

Moar discussion here:

Comments for "Mastodon 3.5" (6 months ago)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862612>

I agree, I started looking at setting up a mastodon instance and didn't get very far before looking at alternatives.

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't really want to run another Wordpress, but Gnu Social looks promising.

Check out pleroma. It uses much less resources than mastodon so it’s been nice as a single user instance.

If you want even lower resource usage, try honk[1] (currently using about 80M whilst my Pleroma is using 350M + 500M from Postgres) (although it is considerably more minimal than Pleroma...)

[1] https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

I love software like that, thanks for sharing. I do worry about seems like a single-user contributor project, though. Pleroma and Mastodon have healthy amounts of contributors and activity, so I feel more comfortable about going with them.

> I do worry about seems like a single-user contributor project, though.

Yeah, fair, especially when it has an, uh, esoteric code style.

And GoToSocial is also a nice alternative to Mastodon

Might be a good choice, but it is early days for microblog.pub. I recommend having a look at GoToSocial. Also relatively new, it is developing fast, and made to be easily self-hostable and for best suited small-scale instances.

https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/

I use Akkoma (https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/) for a single user instance, which is a fork of Pleroma, which is a lot easier to install and maintain. Mastodon was incredibly painful to upkeep.

I can't speak for microblog.pub because I don't use it but it seems to fit the bill. I personally use pleroma, only for myself, and have literally no maintenance besides upgrading the package (and upgrading is a one click operation with yunohost)