Ask HN: What's the best self-host social media platform for closed communities?

6 points by THJr 4 years ago | 7 comments

My friends and family have been looking to keep in touch, and prying them away from Facebook has been difficult. With the recent outage, many of them have started to ask me about self hosted alternatives.

The basic requirements for what they've been asking me have been:

  * Invite Only - New accounts should be restricted to friends/family members that have been directly been invited by an administrator
  * In-Site Media Sharing - Users should be able to upload videos/photos that will only be available to users which have logged into the site
  * Basic feeds/following
  * Direct Messaging between users
  * Editable profiles for contact information
  * Photo albums - sorting photos by events (such as weddings, parties, trips, etc.) would be great, though seems to be less important than the other options.

Thus far the closest thing I've found is Mastodon, which appears to let communities turn off the federation aspect that connects it to other communities. I'm not too familiar though, and the 'seamless account' option which allows you to use one account for unrelated communities makes me worry that I can't actually configure it to be entirely private.

Are there any options that HN can recommend?

nobody9999 4 years ago |

I set up a Synapse/Matrix[0] server for my extended family and it works really well.

It can be accessed via most platforms, including mobile and web[1]

[0] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/server/synapse/

[1] https://element.io/

vorpalhex 4 years ago |

If you want a reddit like experience, check out Lotide: https://github.com/lotide-org/lotide

If you want something more realtime-ish, Matrix would be my go to.

Photos and photo handling will need to be handled out of band. There are several easy solutions here, especially if you are happy paying for an S3 clone.

Feel free to reach out to me and I can at least share my own setup.

THJr 4 years ago | |

Much appreciated, I'll have to check it out. I don't know if my family would be big fans of the link-aggregator style, but I may make use of this with some friend groups in the future.

riffic 4 years ago |

there are forks of Mastodon as well (like Hometown or Glitch-soc). You might want to look at either the awesome-selfhosted github list or this watchlist for activitypub implementations:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...

THJr 4 years ago | |

Thanks, that list really is awesome, will have to spend some time looking through it.

theandrewbailey 4 years ago |

Diaspora, maybe?

https://diasporafoundation.org/

THJr 4 years ago | |

Maybe, the aspects for keeping shares to family only seem useful, but at a glance it looks like diaspora doesn't have an option for closed communities. Thank you for the suggestion though, I'll look further into it!