There's way too much drama on Twitter these days, so the alternatives are looking more appealing than ever. Setting up your own Mastodon server is a fun project, and also a possible alternative to Twitter. In this video, Jay walks you through the entire process of setting up your own Mastodon server on a Debian-based VPS.

Note: This video mentions some regular sponsors (e.g. Linode and CrowdSec), but no company sponsored this video.

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*TIME CODES*
00:00 – Introduction
01:40 – What do you need for this tutorial?
06:13 – Building the cloud instance for Mastodon
08:58 – Adding an /"A record/" to DNS to point to our Mastodon domain
10:52 – Connecting to the server instance via ssh
11:47 – General adjustments to the instance settings and best practices
12:11 – Add a non-root local user account
12:51 – Enable Sudo access for our user account
2:02 PM – Installing updates
15:04 – Adding the domain name to the instance
17:17 – Installing the necessary development packages for Mastodon
20:08 – Creating the PostgreSQL database that we will use for Mastodon
23:27 – Create a system user for Mastodon to run under
24:02 – Download Mastodon from the git repository
26:10 – Set ownership of the mastodon directory
27:49 – The mastodon directory is added to the git safelist
29:48 – Installing the bundle gem and adding additional settings
31:09 – Running Mastodon's configuration script to adjust the settings
36:06 – Installing Mastodon's service files
38:28 – Setting up an NGINX reverse proxy for Mastodon
42:10 – Adding a Let's Encrypt certificate to protect our Mastodon server
46:39 – Set up unmanaged upgrades
48:53 – Installing CrowdSec to help protect our Mastodon instance

*Video specific links*
– Official blog post for this video https://www.learnlinux.tv/?p2278

The following were helpful articles for figuring out some of the missing commands I needed:
– How to install Mastodon on Ubuntu 22.04/20.04 server https://www.linuxbabe.com/ubuntu/how-to-install-mastodon-on-ubuntu
– Install Mastodon Social Network on Ubuntu 22.04 https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-install-mastodon-social-network-on-ubuntu-22-04/

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#debian #mastodon #twitter

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