I give up.

I have tried every way I can to establish a private instance for all of my #fediverse and #socialnetworking needs. I've tried Hubzilla, GNUSocial, and Friendica, but maintaining the cost of a virtual private server isn't justifiable to me and those apps don't play well with shared hosting, which is all I can afford right now (and I don't have the space to set up a personal server).

The fact of the matter is that the only self-hosted application that checks the boxes of being a) dead simple to install on shared hosting--preferably through Softaculous since I just don't feel like jumping through hoops, b) well-supported, c) easy to use, and d) able to connect with both ActivityPub and AT protocols is WordPress, which I am reluctant to use because Matt Mullenweg is a pretty detestable as a human.

That said, I am holding my nose and using WordPress as my social networking hub until and unless something that isn't tainted with Mullenweg's nonsense comes along, so here I be.

I am rebuilding my profile and follow lists, and I apologize to those of you who seem to get a new follow request from me every other day, but I plan on this being the last time until the unlikely WordPress-killer comes around.

Thank you for your patience.

#activitypub #self-hosting #bluesky #fediverse #mastodon #WAFRN #pixelfed #loops #fediverse #socialnetworking