Leeroy Jenkins
Here's a quick announcement about managed Pleroma hosting! The announcement: I'm offering it now.
You can now have your own Pleroma without having to do sysadmin stuff. At present, there is only a "free" tier, this is basically a public beta. It is not super speedy, I'm testing capacity, some stuff I planned to have isn't done yet. It will get faster when the (soon to be open-source) federation proxy is ready.
At some point, it will be open to the public and you will be able to sign up in an automated fashion. For right now, just @ me. If it's possible to cover costs just by donations, then that's what we'll do. Donations are BTC-only at the moment. Maybe we'll do something else. I don't know, it's all up in the air. We have a million ideas and about five of them will work out, so we're starting small and trying things out. Maybe we stay donations-only and just get bigger servers whenever donations pass a threshold, maybe we turn into a conventional paid service and keep a free tier for single-user instances, maybe we share the donations with the admins of the hosted servers to compensate them for shoving a donate button onto their instances. I really don't know, I'm kinda stuck between "Everyone should be able to have one of these" and "The servers/domains cost money and urrbody gotta eat and I wanna funnel some donations to Pleroma team", so we'll see what happens.
FAQ
Which, in this case, stands for "Fcurrently Anticipated Questions":
What if I want my own instance?
If you want to have an instance, you can ping me on fedi if you have an account (@p@freespeechextremist.com, or by email, fse at that domain. I'll put you on the list. When we have a good idea about the performance numbers (I'll be sharing anonymized data on that), I can plan capacity better.
Who can have an instance?
Ideally, anyone. If I get enough server capacity, everyone.
What is the policy?
Don't get me in trouble. Don't do anything illegal in the US: no porn with kids or animals, no recruiting for terrorist organizations, and other stuff like, I don't know, no violations of the RICO act. Just don't do anything illegal.
Don't screw up the service: don't do anything with the intent to disrupt the service for other people, don't hose the servers, don't spam, etc. Don't do anything that'll get me in trouble with the domain registrar, the hosting companies, etc.
Anything else, that's your call: it's your instance. This also means that you're liable for whatever you do with it. I'm disclaiming liability for any actions you take. It'll be configured however you like. Most of this will be automated in the future, several chunks are more manual than I wanted them to be.
As usual, if anything you do means that I have to write a real policy, I will find you where you sleep.
These aren't hard rules, but I'd recommend a few things: being a good citizen of fedi (try to work things out with other admins, try to keep a handle on your instance, etc.), focusing on the fun or interesting stuff rather than fedi drama (whatever you do will snowball, and this is a communication platform, so you will have a better time if you use it to communicate rather than ), and finally, be as transparent as possible with people on your instance.
Other than that, have at it.
What is the timeline?
When I think it's ready. I'm the only one doing any hacking at the moment.
How do I donate?
You can donate to help cover costs for the servers and the domains by sending BTC here: 1BZz3ndJUoWhEvm1BfW3FzceAjFqKTwqWV. This address may change from time to time.
Update: We also have a Liberapay account now.
Elixir is not my favorite programming language.
I have sat through about a million recompiles.