Hello Verse!

So, small introduction to this instance: It’s a generic instance, mainly targeting the Nordics, simply because I myself is from Sweden and wanted an host that is geographically close. That said since the vast majority of content is global an in English this will also be the primary language of this instance.

The reason I am doing this is because I want to add my small contribution in creating an alternative to the large US-controlled social media networks. I really like this concept of smaller separate instances that federate to provide an experience similar to the big centralized networks. Given that I have about a decade of experience of system administration, and decent amount of free cash flow, I figured that the best way to support the Fediverse is creating another instance to share the load… and it also helps that I do like self-hosted things.

Topics

I have tried to create a somewhat curated set of Topics for new users to start from. I’m mostly happy about the communities but there may be some small changes and consolidation of Topics ahead.

Being an instance focused on the Nordic community there is also Topics with Nordic language specific communities.

Communities

At this point I have no intention of creating any new communities based on this instance, simply because most generic communities already exists on other servers and I don’t see a point in further fragmentation.

Creation of communities is open for all members, so if you would feel like this instance is a good place for your community I invite you to go ahead!

Federation

My philosophy on federation is that it should be as open as possible. Other communities shouldn’t be blocked on an instance level except in extreme cases. This may mean that this instance will allow federation from instances that has been blocked from other instances, at least for now. I may change this in the future but I hope not to have to.

Before completely blocking an entire instance softer methods will be tried, like exclusion of content from default feeds and topics. Remember that you as a user always have the option to block users, communities, or entire instances from your settings.

Of course instances that participate in straight up malicious activities that affects the experience will still be blocked. For instance:

• Sharing of Illegal content
• Straight up Spam.
• Vote manipulation

Infrastructure

A core guiding principle in setting up the infrastructure for this instance has been to avoid any dependency on US-based infrastructure. The main providers is:

• CDN provided by Bunny.net, a company based in Slovenia.
• Dedicated servers and S3 storage provided by Hetzner (German company), from their Helsinki datacenter.

In a nutshell the infrastructure consists of a Kubernetes cluster spanning 3 dedicated servers from Hetzner. Including some tools like CloudnativePG for automated HA/Failovers and backups of the database. This will ensure high availability and tolerance of hardware issues. More information about this will probably follow in another post.

There are still some work to be done to fully detach from American companies

• SMTP is sent through AWS, this will be addressed once Hetzner unlocks port 25 for email sending.
• Some backend DNS is still handled by AWS/Cloudflare DNS.

I will be honest though that at the moment I am just a single administrator and this may pose an operational risk due to the bus factor.

Feedback

Don’t hesitate to post in the comments or create new discussions in this meta communities if you have any questions or feedback about this instance.