ohshit604

Hi everyone! I’m looking to run a Mastodon instance on a home server, entirely within LAN, without owning a domain

Without a domain you cannot federate with other instances, otherwise how would they know what to call you.

It does not need to interact with other Mastodon instances,

but users on the local server should still be able to follow accounts on other Mastodon servers. Local users should also be able to create posts and see each other’s posts on the local instance.

These two statements contradict each other, you can’t receive content and not send it at the same time, your instance will ideally try to stay in sync with all the other instances, posts and comments included.

Nonetheless when it comes to self hosting (and well literally anything you create) follow the documentation and it will always point you in the right direction.

Chiming in as an instance admin. The larger the instance the slower federation becomes as it has to send the data to every instance that it federates with, if you’re a small instance just starting out federating with Lemmy.world for example is extremely slow as you’re essentially last in line to receive any data.

I have also noticed holes in federation, for instance a community I created !ca_firearms_rights@lemmy.halstead.host federates with sh.itjust.works fine but not Lemmy.world (haven’t figured out why).

Give it time, hopefully correct itself.

Community Rule 7 & 8.

Take that survey, express yourself

I also know there is a script you can set up which will handle the initial contact to federate automatically.

I tried finding such a script but had no luck. I was able to export my subscription list from sh.itjust.works and imported it on my instance.

I had to unsubscribe and resubscribe as I was experiencing the ‘Subscribe Pending’ issue but after a little while things seemed to start evening out and becoming a bit more stable.

My instance has been online for about a month, the supplied docker-compose.yaml was quite straightforward, had a little headache with Nginx but nothing overly complicated.

The long-con so to speak is federation, you have to subscribe to each community manually to begin federating with them, i have noticed timing issues with other instances such as Lemmy.world and have not been able to resolve them.

Guess you won’t be making issues there for a while eh

If you really need to expose something to the internet set yourself up an SSO/OIDC provider and have it sit in front of the service and have a deny-first policy in place, whitelist the known few IP’s that need to connect regularly or alternatively geoblock.

Virtualize or containerize everything.

I can see the appeal of downloading YouTube opposed to streaming, however if folks are looking to stream I would suggest Invidious