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I'm increasingly unsure if this is something to aspire for. I make an effort to only follow people I know, and I turn off algorithmic feeds on social media, but it doesn't matter because the people I know routinely engage with made-up political bait and AI slop that's coming from the broader ecosystem.

This sucks and there's no way to push back on that. First, if you do it too much, you're just a "reply guy" - you become a part of the same suckiness of social media that you're trying to push back against. Second, the near-universal reaction you get is "maybe these specific immigrants were not eating pets, but you gotta agree with my broader concern about immigration". This just an example, the reaction has its equivalent for all sides of the political spectrum. We just like to read stuff that aligns with our political identity and beliefs. The pursuit of truth is a distant second.

What I'm saying is that for social networks or forums to be at least somewhat healthy, I think they need to be small, specifically to limit the interactions you have with complete strangers and content that doesn't interest you at all. If you open up the ecosystem too much, you devolve into some flavor of Facebook.

I guess that one day soon we will have a Claw that just pumps information between all the different social networks.

I have a forum I self-hosted for friends and family, they have their own login I gave them, it typically have 3-4 posts a week or something, at the very least one post from me as I have a "What I've been up to this week" thread. Seems to work out OK, and is probably as private as you can have something on the public internet.

I’d recommend installing a Pleroma server. It speaks ActivityPub and you can use any of the nice Mastodon apps with it. I've run a Mastodon server for the last 9 years, and wouldn't recommend Pleroma over it for a large many-user instance, but it's relatively tiny and lightweight for a personal server. You can configure it not to talk to the rest of the Fediverse so that it remains your friendly, isolated silo.

I tossed together a mattermost server. It’s effectively a slack cove and works pretty great.

If you also want to host or build interesting social apps, you should definitely do an isolated atproto / Bluesky service! https://blueskydirectory.com/

As for actually doing this... running a PDS and relay isn't that hard, and the red dwarf web client is online and can be configured to point to whatever appview you want. There's significantly less experience running your own appview, but there are options & folks are happy to help.

You could use this: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Example: https://freecities.app

Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b

Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.

Do we even need documentation with LLMs? :)

It seems to be made for nerds (and I say that kindly) and not potential users. It’s way too tech blurb and not enough show what you getting into.