[shoover]

I set up a private Mastodon server for my family several weeks ago and we're loving it. It's a mighty impressive Rails/React app, very well designed and implemented. I have a few minor UI quibbles based on experience with twitter, but the design is really good, responsive, and snappy.

The kids run Fedilab on hand-me-down, wifi-only Android phones and just go to town with emojis, gifs, and photos. The parents share more of their days with the kids rather than only texting each other.

The setup guide is great--I followed it on a 1GB Vultr VPS and was up and running easily, except for one maddening hurdle, which is that on 1GB server you do need a swap file to successfully precompile JS assets. See [1] for the workaround. I guess this is just normal in 2019. Otherwise all the services run fine with 1GB once compiled.

I wish it supported locking down public posts at the admin level, but that's just my use case. The login system blocks most access, and public posts can be blocked with nginx authentication and tweaking the list of streams flagged public in the streaming service.

[1] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/5836#issuecomme...

[shoover]

Ah, they have a card in progress for a one-click Digital Ocean install [1]. Fantastic! This is an incredible open source project to watch, not your typical library or system service, but a real, polished app.

Polls functionality is in master, just waiting for release. My kids are going to love this.

[1] - https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/projects/8#card-185452...