The Personal Website of Jeremy Boles

GoToSocial

A lighter-weight Fediverse server.

GoToSocial is an open source Fediverse server you run yourself. It speaks the same protocol as the better-known Mastodon, so the two interoperate.

It concentrates on providing an API and ships no web client of its own. You point one of the many Mastodon-API clients at it instead.

Debian doesn’t package it, so installation means the release binary or a container. Their documentation covers both.

Database

It won’t start on the default config. Create a database first:

sudo -u postgres psql
CREATE DATABASE gotosocial WITH ENCODING 'UTF-8' LOCALE 'C.UTF-8' LOCALE_PROVIDER 'builtin' TEMPLATE template0;
CREATE USER gotosocial WITH PASSWORD '[PASSWORD]';
\connect gotosocial
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE gotosocial TO gotosocial;
GRANT CREATE ON SCHEMA public TO gotosocial;
\quit

Then put the credentials, and a few paths, into the config:

db-host: "127.0.0.1"
db-password: "[PASSWORD]"
letsencrypt-cert-dir: "/var/lib/gotosocial/certs"
storage-local-base-path: "/var/lib/gotosocial/storage"

User Set Up

gotosocial --config-path /etc/gotosocial/gotosocial.yaml \
    admin account create \
    --username user \
    --email user@example.com \
    --password "SUPER_SECRET"
gotosocial --config-path /etc/gotosocial/gotosocial.yaml \
    admin account promote \
    --username user

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