I'm a bit curious about GoToSocial, in particular because I want to host a few Fediverse/ActivityPub instances myself, and GTS seems to be a bit less resource hungry and supports "backports" of past data.
Does anyone have experience with the GTS platform vs Mastodon? I'm not interested in a "flame war", just objective comparisons.
@mkj @joho yes I have a self-hosted GtS instance (well they are all self-hosted solo instances for the most part) and LOVE it.
With SLURP you could even migrate your entire Mastodon or Pixelfed post archive to it.
1000% recommended and I plan to write a guide to set it up via YunoHost next month (busy April) 😅
only downside is that it works for "small" accounts so with 3k followers it's getting a little overwhelmed. I fixed it by creating a cron job to restart dnsmasq every 8 hours
Thank you for the feedback! 😊
There's no chance of me ever reaching 3k followers, so that seems like something I could use then.
The thing is that I already have an instance up and running with part of the required blocks, so it seems like that may be a good fit.
Why is there only 24h in a day ... 🙄
"Porting" your fediverse/activitypub data is also very welcome news 🤓
@joho @mkj you're welcome Joaquim.
FYI both @box464 and @joel have written about their experiences migrating their Pixelfed archives to GoToSocial. A Mastodon move should be similar:
Joel's post
🔗 : https://www.tumfatig.net/2025/gotosocial-adventures-migrate-from-pixelfed/
Jeff's post:
🔗 : https://box464.com/posts/gotosocial-slurp/
Wishing you all the best with your move!
When I decided to stop publishing on Instagram, I seeked for alternatives and Pixelfed looked like a nice one. The fact that it had a migration feature from IG made me go for it. But for reasons, I don’t want to use this software anymore. And now that GoToSocial features the Gallery / Gram-style layout , it is time to migrate the account and its data to GtS.
@joho I run a fedi instance for myself and a few "playground" accounts, filled with some followings and my "poor man’s relay" (reading RSS feeds of hashtags from other instances with a script and injecting the stuff via Mastodon search API).
First I used #Mastodon (on a #hetzner cloudserver with 8G RAM). A Rails app is not a problem to install and run for me (that’s what I do for a living). But once it's running and federating, there is always something going on on the server that eats a lot of memory and creates surprisingly high CPU usage. And it fills your disc.
So I decided to use #GoToSocial (on a cloudserver with 4 G RAM) for the same stuff, with Postgres. The main difference is the Interface (I use #Phanpy instead of Mastodon’s web interface), of course. Some of the nice "bells and whistles" from Mastodon (like the automatic author attribution, automatic OG preview pics for links in the timeline and all the "trending" stuff, etc.) aren’t there, that’s okay for me.
I barely notice a system load with GTS. It also fills your disc, but you can use a short media purge time, because GTS can reload a pic or a video from its origin if it is already purged away. Something that Mastodon cannot do.
@bill @joho I will write this up with a ruby example. The problem is: My solution is part of a larger Rails project that does all my "dirty backend work" for a lot of unrelated tasks (whenever I need some stuff on my server I add it do this thing 😀), so I have to pull the code out of this.
In principle it's easy: You read the RSS feed of a tag page from an instance (just add .rss to a tag page), iterate over it and take the "id" (which is the URL of the post) from each feed item. This id you send to your server’s API (you have to create a token for API access that has to be send in the headers with the request) with a GET request like YOUR_SERVER_URL/api/v2/search?resolve=true&q=THE_ID_FIELD_FROM_FEED_ITEM. Your server searches it in the fediverse and it is available on it afterwards.
This works only with hashtags that have posts in reasonable numbers, of course. But I doubt anyway that there are hashtags in Fediverse that have hundreds of posts in a short period of time like Twitter et al.
@fyrfli I was looking for "do:s" and "don't:s" and "If you choose this, you get this, but miss that", and so on.
I have GtS up and running now, and will play with it for a while. My first impressions are good; the installation was simple, resource usage is definitely OK for my environment, thus far, and so on.
"Porting" an account over may be the next "big step" 🤓
Joaquim Homrighausen
mkj
Elena Rossini ⁂
Andreas Andersen on GoToSocial
ralf g.
bill
Krzysztof Sakrejda
fyrfli, jamaican-born, universe-made
shellsharks
d@nny disc@ mc²