This year, 2025, marks the 10th anniversary of our self-hosted, community-driven server, Undernet Uruguay. The project was born on May 1, 2015, when I sent my first email inviting some friends to join the newly created Friendica node. Since then, we have hosted various social platforms and communication services, including GNU Social and Diaspora*, which are now discontinued.
Among all the services, the most significant has been our Mastodon instance, created on April 24, 2017, just a few months after Mastodon's initial release. It was also one of the earliest Mastodon instances in Latin America, launched alongside the Mexican instance mstdn.mx, which went live just three day earlier.
Today, we also operate a PeerTube instance, which serves as a platform for video and multimedia content for various social, political, educational, and hacking organizations. Over the past decade, we have learned a lot and made enormous efforts to maintain these services, regardless of external challenges. In addition to our global services, we also support local projects of community interest, such as a weather station, an NTP time server, and others.
We now run on a business-class internet connection, with remote server backups and storage redundancy across all our servers. Our hardware, though still composed of consumer-level components, has a total capacity of 18 cores, 50 GB of RAM, and 14 TB of redundant storage. This infrastructure is maintained on a modest budget of approximately $150 USD per month, with donations covering nearly 50% of the costs on average, not including hardware replacements or upgrades.
Our main services listed in https://undernet.uy include:
- Mastodon
- PeerTube
- Nextcloud + Collabora Office
- Email
- IRC and XMPP
- Game servers
- Telnet and Citadel web BBS
- phpBB forum
- Overleaf collaborative LaTeX editor
While I usually write about these topics in Spanish, this time I wanted to share our story with English speakers as well. If you'd like to support us, you can do so via Ko-fi, PayPal, or Liberapay.
-> https://ko-fi.com/mastodonuy
-> https://liberapay.com/undernet.uy/donate
-> https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_button_id=E2PYDHB6K5KRC
Feel free to share or boost this publication to help us reach a wider audience!
#server #selfhost #undernet #uruguay #10year #anniversary #community #diy #support #mastodon #peertube #fediverse
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