Running a Diaspora* Pod

A few months ago, I was reading up on alternative social networking sites to Facebook. I find their privacy policy too invasive, and now I only use it when required.

Although it still has a long way to go, Diaspora* is a great contender in the ring. It lacks a few features such as events and groups, but those are in active development (yay!).

I decided to help out the project in one of the easiest ways (for me) that I could: by starting another pod.

Diaspora* is different than sites like Facebook in that the whole system is distributed; that is, there is no central set of servers that know everything. Anyone can start their own pod and get it talking with other pods. I decided to start my own Canadian pod, diasp.ca.

It's been fairly well-received. Within a few short months there have been about 130 users join the pod, with about 2/3rds of them being active^[1] pod users.

It's not light on server requirements, however. Running a pod on a single gig of RAM is quite difficult and requires swap space to be allocated. Even at fairly low usage, a fair amount of swapping occurs, which negatively affects the overall experience. One could just throw more RAM at it, but RAM costs money, and the whole service is free. I would gladly buy hardware and host it myself, but my home internet connection is not equipped to handle that kind of traffic.

For now, I will happily host my pod on DigitalOcean and cover the server costs myself. As it grows in popularity however, I'll have to make an upgrade to something more powerful.