2.2 GoToSocial Fediverse Instance

GoToSocial (GtS) is a great alternative for hosting your own fediverse instance. Some time ago I decided to look into it and found it to be a great project maintained by a great and agile team.

GtS supports and extends the Mastodon client API specification. This allows to use many Mastodon clients that you find in the app store. And for GtS you need an app because it does not provide a frontend. A list of apps can be found on this page. Personally I prefer FediText which is a clone of MetaText which is no longer maintained. One of the GtS contributors also contributes to FediText, which keeps FediText on top of the newest feature add ons.

Install GoToSocial

All I did was following the instructions provided by the GtS team.

Caddy Setup

GtS is providing the webpage at port 8080. To make the service publicly available Caddy needs to be configured with an additional entry in its Caddyfile. I assume you have created the domain gts.example.com that can be used for providing GtS on the internet.

Now you need to add following lines in the file /etc/caddy/Caddyfile:

gts.example.com {
    encode zstd gzip
    reverse_proxy localhost:8080 {
        flush_interval -1
    }
    respond /livez 404
    respond /readyz 404
}

With following commands Caddy will read the new configuration and you can check for the status:

cd /etc/caddy
sudo caddy reload
sudo service caddy status

Caddy will provide the GtS as website with the address https://gts.example.com. An SSL certificate will be assigned and updated automatically.

Post Install