Tried my hand at a custom install but realized it would be a headache to maintain, not just install.
I hope Spacebear's small plan is sufficient for our needs. $8/mo itself will be hard to break even with. 😕
Up and running with a rough-edges install of Pleroma with Soapbox in less than an hour. 😲
So how does this federation thing work? How soon after following someone on another instance do I get to see my federated timeline populate?
Read https://blog.soykaf.com/post/how-federation-works/ and it appears to me there's a lot of initial work to do before I invite friends over. 😕
Also... why don't I see anything when I visit a profile on any other instance? Can #Pleroma not request the full profile? Why *just* what we *need*?
I understand it might be great for performance, but it's confusing for the average person to see incomplete profiles with no way to fetch more info.
@celia I wish you good luck with this !
@celia I have this grand dream of hosting a private Mastodon/Pleroma instance for my family. I've done experiments with running a server and playing with it but actually running is the easy part. Getting people to use it is the hard part!
@qwazix I've been quietly dropping that in conversation with friends for months to try and plant the seed in their heads!
@rmgr I absolutely agree! Friend Camp gives me hope.
@farhan Would Pleroma let me have an "instance-only" posting mode?
The fork of Mastodon maintained by the author of runyourown.social allows this - https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown
https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/merge_requests/2289
@celia Wow, I hadn't heard about spacebear. Pretty good pricing, too. I *kind* of want to have my own mastodon instance, but I like it here too much.
@nathand Oh I love it here too! Not leaving at all. :)
@celia Considering the PeerTube, option. Though I'm not much of a videographer, either 😅
@celia
Maybe you already know it, but there's @mastohost too.
@emanuel @mastohost Yeah, but sadly they don't support Hometown (which is a lightweight fork of Mastodon)
@celia
Till this day I didn't know about Hometown 🤦🏼 Always learning 😀
whoops! 
@Jakobiner @celia @robby @stux I love that a RPi4 is “a bit overpowered” for Pleroma.
@robby Going to try it again. 🤷♀️
Mastodon is far more stable as an overall product imo so I want to stick with it for now. Hometown, although, doesn't have an exit path, sadly.
@celia Couple of minutes, usually. Depends if their server is up.
But following affects your Home timeline, not really your Federated one (unless it's the first follow between the two instances – assuming Pleroma works like Mastodon, anyway).
@wizzwizz4 Yeah it would be the first follow between these two servers. I think it does work similarly.
@celia Welcome! :)
@celia what exactly is missing?
I believe it was totally taken out since then and I don't know the status, if that will ever be rebuilt.
I've decided to just subscribe to relays and pick people interesting out. It fills up your timeline fairly quickly that way anyway.
@Jakobiner @rusi @mariusor That's a shame... this is such a primitive feature but I understand it might be too tricky to get right.
More and more I think I'm going to try setting up Hometown again! 😕
@Jakobiner @rusi @celia I feel like that is overreaching and over engineering something that should have been just a synchronous API call to the viewed actor's outbox.
My thoughts as well. I think the API call to fetch initial posts was triggered at the wrong moment i.e. not on discovering a new user in the DB, but on fetching a user's profile.
By the way, here is the related issue on the Pleroma gitlab: ( https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/1595 )
#Spacebear provides #Hometown hosting! This is pretty cool! A bit expensive but probably worth it for the peace of mind.
Not sure how many approx. users small and medium plans can accommodate. Dropped them an email. 📧