Maroon

I want to capitalise on the current "X-odus" momentum, and convince my university (or at least my department, which is quite big) to have its own Mastodon server.

My rationale is that if I can convince my uni/dept that they will have better reach, control and experience with Mastodon, it will help populate the Fediverse and bring more academics on this platform to disseminate their research.

The reason I am asking the self-hosting community for help is because I know nothing about hosting my own Mastodon server, but should I manage to have a talk with my IT head or the dept head and convince them to come to the Fediverse, I might need to spin up a server for them.

1. How easy is it to get Mastodon up and going?
2. How costly a hardware do I need to ask for?
3. How expensive is it to run the server annually?
4. Any other points or aspects I need to keep in mind?

A while ago, I had requested help with using LLMs to manage all my teaching notes. I have since installed Ollama and been playing with it to get a feel for the setup.

I was also suggested the use of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation ) and CA (cognitive architecture). However, I am unclear on good self hosted options for these two tasks. Could you please suggest a few?

For example, I tried ragflow.io and installed it on my system, but it seems I need to setup an account with a username and password to use it. It remains unclear if I can use the system offline like the base ollama model, and that information won't be sent from my computer system.

I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc.

As I spend more time here, I realise that it is practically impossible; especially for a newcomer, to setup any any usable self hosted web service without relying on these corporate behemoths.

I wanted to have my own little static website and alongside that run Immich, but I find that without Cloudflare, Google, and AWS, I run the risk of getting DDOSed or hacked. Also, since the physical server will be hosted at my home (to avoid AWS), there is a serious risk of infecting all devices at home as well (currently reading about VLANS to avoid this).

Am I correct in thinking that avoiding these corporations is impossible (and make peace with this situation), or are there ways to circumvent these giants and still have a good experience self hosting and using web services, even as a newcomer (all without draining my pockets too much)?

Edit: I was working on a lot of misconceptions and still have a lot of learn. Thank you all for your answers.

I am working on a simple static website that gives visitors basic information about myself and the work I do. I want this as a way use to introduce myself to potential clients, collaborators, etc., rather than rely solely on LinkedIn as my visiting card.

This may seem sound rather oxymoronic given that I am literally going to be placing (some relevant) details about myself and my work on the internet, but I want to limit the websites' access from bots, web scraping and content collection for LLMs.

Is the a realistic expectation?

Also, any suggestions on privacy respecting, yet inexpensive domains that I can purchase in Europe would be of super great help.

I am a teacher and I have a LOT of different literature material that I wish to study, and play around with.

I wish to have a self-hosted and reasonably smart LLM into which I can feed all the textual material I have generated over the years. I would be interested to see if this model can answer some of my subjective course questions that I have set over my exams, or write small paragraphs about the topic I teach.

In terms of hardware, I have an old Lenovo laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card.

P.S: I am not technically very experienced. I run Linux and can do very basic stuff. Never self hosted anything other than LibreTranslate and a pihole!

I am somewhat late into the Linux-verse (three years in now) and want to move into self-hosting to do two things:

1. Host my own Jitsi server and sessions. (or any other open source solution)

2. Host my own solution to privately and securely share photographs of my kids and life here with my family abroad.

At some point, I want to host my own little static-website about myself which should “replace” having to give people a LinkedIn account or something.

The thing is, I know nothing about owning domains, etc. I have never done this before. I have been lurking around this forum to learn some of the basics, but would really like a more tailored reply (is possible). I am working in Europe.

1. Which computer should I use? I want to host everything on my computer at home. I don’t want to go the VPS route.

2. Where can I buy an inexpensive domain(s)? I assume I only need one.

3. What other things do I need to consider? My current broadband is IPv4 only.