[JoshTriplett]

What has your experience been with self-hosting?

I'd love to self-host a Mastodon instance that two-way mirrors my Twitter account and acts as a Twitter client (letting me pseudo-follow folks from Twitter). But in any case, I'd want to ensure that no content from people I follow gets mirrored/hosted on my own instance; the only content actually hosted on my own instance should be the content I post.

[zach43]

I've had a pretty good experience self-hosting with Pleroma. Its quite amazing that I can run a social media server with just a $5 VPS.

Not sure if there are bots / apps that can easily let you follow Twitter users on Mastodon, but I've definitely seen mastodon - twitter crossposter apps before.

[StavrosK]

What do you mean? No content other than what your users generate will be hosted on your instance.

[bisby]

There is a concept of a federated timeline, which does get synced to your local instance. If you follow someone on a remote instance, that instance feeds content into your instance so it can be loaded.

[StavrosK]

It syncs the people you follow, right? So presumably the only additional content on your instance is content from the people you follow, which should generally be low-risk.

[metildaa]

You can also block just media if an instance is known to host images that are illegal in your country or your users don't want to see (silencing is a better option for the latter tho).

[bisby]

I believe once you follow someone, you become federated with their instance. and you potentially receive all content from that instance... I think?

there are also admin controls for managing moderation and federation.

[JoshTriplett]

I still don't want to host anyone else's content, for much the same reason I'm never going to have an unmoderated comment system on a site.