this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I tried this but the post are not private even when federation is disabled. The post are publicly visible if you find the URL.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I can select followers only

image

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Oh that is promising...do you know if that can be selected as default or does it always have to be applied per post?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Might be good to create an account and check it out yourself :)

media

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You're awesome. I'll go dig deeper on this :) Thank you

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

On iOS, Tusker (for Mastodon and Pixelfed) has settings to set the default for composing and replying:

edit: also note that you can set your pixelfed account to private in general, but I think you have to check that box from the website interface. None of the apps I have include that setting.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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 :/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I'd go with immich

[–] Still 4 points 11 months ago

you could setup a matrix chat room and just block federation as viewing the channels requires login

also has e2ee

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Why not run Lemmy without federation?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Does Diaspora have a mobile app? I thought it was only progressive web.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

You could also run a private XMPP chat server. https://snikket.org/ is easy to install and ideal for small family groups.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ive just seen this for nextcloud photos, don't know how its working with mobile apps though

https://github.com/nextcloud/photos/issues/432#issuecomment-1458591601

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I currently use Nextcloud and using photos on mobile is rough. Although I had forgotten about that comment feature on files.