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#mastodon #fediverse #socialmedia

00:00 Intro 00:39 Sponsor: Extend the life of your Python applications 01:30 The Fediverse: a network of social networks 04:57 ActivityPub: all your social networks can talk to each other 06:44 How Mastodon works 08:33 How PeerTube works 10:19 How PixelFed works 11:39 Parting thoughts 13:02 Sponsor: buy a device that runs Linux perfectly 14:11 Support the channel

Join Mastodon: https://joinmastodon.org/servers Join Peertube: https://joinpeertube.org/ Join PixelFed: https://pixelfed.org/servers

PixelFed App for iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/5HpHJD5l PixelFed App for Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.pixeldroid.app/

List of Fediverse services: https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/

Fediverse is a contraction of Federated Universe. It's basically a very large network of servers that form, well, a social network. But contrary to the ones you might be used to, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, the Fediverse is composed of different services.

The more well known are Mastodon, a Twitter-like microblogging service, PeerTube, a youtube-like platform, or PixelFed, an Instagram-like social network, but there are a TON of others.

Each service is also decentralized, which means there is not one big server farm where everything is hosted: each service is split into instances, basically independent servers, with different goals.

ActivityPub is an open standard, that lets all services on the Fediverse talk to each other. How does that work? Well, in practice, it means you can use your Mastodon app to follow a Peertube channel, or someone that posts pictures on PixelFed, or see new articles from a Wordpress website.

And this goes a bit further: for example, if I comment on Mastodon on a post from Peertube, that comment will also appear on Peertube underneath the video.

Let's start with Mastodon. Mastodon is basically Twitter, but open source and decentralized. It lets you post messages with up to 500 characters, it supports images, videos, polls, content warnings, animated avatar pictures, emojis, links, mentions, hashtags, anything you're used to on Twitter. Mastodon has 1.5 million active users, which might seem small compared to Twitter, but it's more than enough to have interesting conversations with a lot of cool people.

To join Mastodon, all you need to do is pick a server, also called an instance. You can pick any server you like, and it will let you interact with everyone else on any other server.

And then, you can use Mastodon on the web, by typing the address of your instance in your browser, for example, for me, it's mastodon.social, or you can use a mobile app.

Now let's talk about PeerTube. It's a Youtube alternative, although it's much, much smaller. Peertube is also decentralized, being split into different servers, that are federated together, so you can follow people from different instances and still have a complete subscription feed. It also supports ActivityPub, which means you could subscribe to my peerTube channel from a mastodon account, and have a post in your timeline every time I publish a video.

And as a creator, it also lets you sync your youtube channel to it, so you can auto-publish all your videos to Peertube in a few clicks, which is also a great help.

To watch peertube, just type the address of your instance in your browser's URL, for me it's tilvids.com.

Another cool service on the Fediverse is PixelFed. It's basically Instagram, without all the crap they tacked on lately, like reels, or lives. It's just pictures and videos. It's free software, it also uses the ActivityPub standard, so you can follow PixelFed users on Mastodon, for example, and it's ad-free.

It also lets you add filters, just like Instagram, or crop, resize, adding alt text, and you can use hashtags, locations, or create collections, basically photo albums.

After we reviewed a few services that allow you to switch from Google's, it's time to move on to something a bit more complex, but more secure as well: hosting your own services ! To do so, there is something fantastic, that can replicate most of what Google offers: NextCloud. It's not only a file storage solution, but it can also handle email, photos, music, calendar, an online office suite, and a lot more, since it has a giant gallery of apps that you can add to your own instance !

Set up your own Linux server with LINODE : http://www.linode.com/linuxexperiment (USE OFFER CODE LINUXEXP19)

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Commands:

Create a user: adduser "YOUR USERNAME"

Give it the sudo permissions: usermod -aG sudo "YOUR USERNAME"

Log out of the root user: logout

Install Nextcloud: sudo snap install nextcloud

Setting up the server There are plenty of ways you can go about doing that. You could use an older computer, a rasperry Pie, or any machine at your house, and turn it into a server by installing the server version of your distro of choice. If you don't want to mess with that or you don't want to configure too many things, you can also turn yourself to cloud-hosted server providers, which is exactly what I'll do. There are plenty around, some geared towards having more storage space, some providing powerful GPUs for distributed calculations, and some oriented towards CPU power. Here, I'll be createing an entry-level server with Linode. I bet you didn't see that one coming !

Most providers will allow you to pick between pre-selected distro to install, or will let you choose a custom one to put on the server. For servers, debian-based distros are often the most robust, as are everything based on Red Hat. But here, Ubuntu has a distinct advantage over most other available options: you can install nextcloud with just one command line, thanks to snap. I know some of you aren't fans of this technology, but it's honestly the easiest option here. I'll be going with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, which should be stable and perform perfectly well.

Here, I'll pick a small Linode, called a Nanode, since I don't plan on using my server for file storage, but if you're planning on replacing Google Photos or Google Drive with Nextcloud, you should get something with a bigger hard drive. Most providers also allow you to add storage to your existing server afterwards, so no worries.

Creating a user Once your server is created, and your distro has booted, you can access its console to install whatever you need. That's where we'll be installing Nextcloud through snap. To begin, we'll need to create a user that is not the superuser, called Root, so we'll login as root to do that. Enter "root" as the login, and the root password you selected when you created your server. If you installed Ubuntu on your own server, you probably already created a user during the distro's installation, so skip that step !

We'll just type "adduser", followed by a space, and the name of the user we want to create. We'll have to answer a few questions such as the user's full name and its password. The rest is not important here. Our user does not have the rights to run super user commands, which we'll need to install anything, so we'll start by adding our new user to the sudoers group.

Let's type usermod -aG sudo. followed by a space then the name of the user.

And we're done ! Now, we just type logout, to quit being root, and login as our new user, just by typing its username and password.

Installing Nextcloud and logging in Using SNAP, it's only one command line: sudo snap install nextcloud

Once the command has completed its task, we'll need to access our nextcloud instance. Simply get the IP address of your server. To do so, either look in your server manager, if you're using a cloud provider, or type: ifconfig

Your server's IP address is the first series of numbers in the first line.

Copy and paste that in a browser's window to access your nextcloud instance. You'll be asked to create an admin account, so just the username and password you'll want to use to manage your nextcloud instance, and you're in !

Now, this method is pretty easy, but is has one drawback: it will install using its own HTTP and mysql server, so if you want to use the same machine for something else on top of nextcloud, you'll run two servers at the same time, which is not that efficient, but for our simple purposes here, it's not an issue.

And that's it ! Now you have a nextcloud instance up and running. You can explore its various settings, the apps you can install on it, all from the gear menu in the top right corner. I highly recommend you register a domain name and install an SSL certificate, so your server uses HTTPS instead of HTTP, it will be a lot more secure.