Hey selfhosters,
I’m looking for some help finding a selfhosted local only social network with mobile apps (for the less tech savvy).
Basically my family lives all over the place and we want an easy way to share photos of our children and family events with comments and engagement. We are privacy minded and don’t want pictures of our kids drifting over a social network. I’m struggling to find any software that is always local only and private.
Somethings I have seen that seem promising but not quite right:
- Secure Scuttlebutt Apps
- Mastodon +Hometown
- Immich
- Just a plane old blog
Hometown is almost perfect but it still allows for federation and that will be hard to teach some of my family about. Immich looks great! But doesn’t have anyway to engage nor feed.
Hopefully someone out there knows of something. Ideally it would have an interface like social media without the intent to reach the wider world outside of my family.
You could run pixelfed without federation enabled: https://pixelfed.org/
It’s like instagram, so should be good for sharing photos and stuff with space for comments.
I tried this but the post are not private even when federation is disabled. The post are publicly visible if you find the URL.
Oh that is promising…do you know if that can be selected as default or does it always have to be applied per post?
I thought about this route since I’m using Yunohost for testing at the moment and it has it’s own authentication. But the authentication prevents mobile apps from being able to access the server. Mobile apps are a must for the older people in my family who are less tech able.
Maybe https://www.kombuchaprivacy.com/circles/ suits your needs. It’s cool but not widespread.
Pixelfed is a nice social photo sharing service as others have already said
I’d highly suggest using a service like immich or nextcloud or any other photo software to share images. Use it in combination of a chat app like matrix/element/schildichat
I’m leaning towards Immich at the moment if I can’t configure pixelfed to my liking. On the chat side of things that is sort of what we do now but I was wanting something a bit more asynchronous. With chat we can send photos, but what we were wanting is somewhere to just post stuff and other family can view it on their own time or go back and see a previous post. With chat it’s a bit too ephemeral for the grandmas and grandpas…they keep asking us to send the same photos because they cant find it in the chat history :/
you could setup a matrix chat room and just block federation as viewing the channels requires login
also has e2ee
You could also run a private XMPP chat server. https://snikket.org/ is easy to install and ideal for small family groups.
