Pure Heart is now hosted on 🐘 Mastodon

What is Mastodon? It's decentralized social media, and it's fun. 

You can click on the link here - https://pureheart.page

Now, I will explain the boring (well, not boring for me, I love this geeky stuff) guide on how it was installed. (Because I think it's great to have notes for this in the future). 

History: A few years ago I found out about Mastodon social media and felt really inspirited to host my own mastodon server since it was possible. I did and then invited some family members, but due to the cost back then, it was over my budget. Fast forward to November 2024, I got inspired again to re-build a Mastodon server, why, well, I love the little elephant, and I love how you can host your own stuff and not really have to follow rules. I guess I'm a rebel. I don't know. 

These are the guides I followed and used to get the initial server setup, and such. 

Here is the first guides

I learned that my VPS (Virtual Private Server) had to have swap space because it error ed out on installation. Lessons Learned. 

https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-add-swap-space-on-ubuntu-22-04/

 

I learned that I needed to add a user to the admin group and configure a basic firewall on the server (separate from the firewall on the hosts virtual server control panel)

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/initial-server-setup-with-ubuntu#step-4-setting-up-a-firewall

 

This is basic security, but username and password logins should be disabled and SSH keys should be used and enforced. This next articles explains that.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-ssh-keys-on-ubuntu-20-04

 

 

The SMTP relay has to be setup, here is a guide I used for this. (key part is that in the .conf file, the SMTP relay = the url of the SMTP server, in my case, I used brevo)

https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-mastodon-server#1_Set_up_a_relay_SMTP_server

Now that these are set, I'm ready to install 🐘 Mastodon

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/prerequisites/

By the way, I'm using ionos.com for my VPS. They have small package at $3.00 a month for the first three months and then $5.00 per month after this. I found it was affordable for me. https://www.ionos.com/

 

The blog I'm using for this is Blogger, and the SSL cert and sub-domain are also free. 

My domain is hosted on squarespace and this domain is only $20.00 per year