home.social HOME.social

May 23rd, 2023: Update Everyone: home.social will close down on June, 16th 2023 23:59 CET. Please migrate your accounts in time to avoid losing content and followers. Thanks. May 10th, 2023: Update Folks, I'm thinking about closing down home.social later this year. Moderation efforts and "inter-instance-wars" have become a nightmare and I consider those a fundamental flaw in Mastodons core design. I also have come to believe, that larger instances might defy the purpose of the fediverse. You might want to start migrating accounts to other instances. HOME.social is a home for all people who are committed to being excellent to each other. Free for all. Determined to inclusivity and diversity and to provide a welcoming and inclusive environment. Hosted in Germany. Why should I "trust" HOME.social? "Trust takes many years to build, few seconds to break, and forever to repair." Since we just met, this cannot and should not be about trust. I can, however, be transparent about who is running this instance, how it is financed and why it exists. That's what the following paragraphs are all about. If at the end, you decide to sign up, I wish you a very warm welcome. If you care about these things, as of December 2022 HOME.social has an A+ rating at Mozilla Observatory, 100% at internet.nl and ranks among the top ten instances on instances.social. One more thing: Mastodon has a feature allowing you to move your account to a different server at any time. All your followers and followings will automatically move, too. So, don’t be afraid, picking a server is not a lifetime decision! Ralf Rottmann Donations First things first, because I get frequently asked: Using HOME.social will always be free for everyone. We are experimenting with donations via Patreon and as an alternative via the open source platform Liberapay. Who or what is Rottmann Ventures GmbH? A GmbH is a "limited liability company" and the most dominant legal form in Germany. There are GmbHs with hundreds of thousands of employees and those with smaller teams. A GmbH has to adhere to operate within pretty strict legal boundaries which grants its partners some degree of reliability and trustworthyness. For example, its address has to be always kept up-to-date and must be publicly available. Rottmann Ventures (RV) only has a team of 1, it is literally just me. Its main purpose is to invest my personal money (more to that later) into startups and entrepreneurs. Besides that, RV holds shares of companies it has invested into, owns most of my IT equipment - like the servers HOME.social runs on - and real estate. I incorporated the company in 2009, so it has been around for quite a while. Rottmann Ventures also is a proud sponsor of Mastodon gGmbH to support the ongoing development of the platform. Where are the HOME.social servers located? Main Server: * Ampere Altra Q80-30 * 80 x Arm64 cores * 256 GB DDR4 ECC RAM * 2 x 3.84 TB NVMe SSD in RAID 1 * Full daily automated backups * Located in Falkenstein, Germany We also have smaller spare servers prepared to fan out worker and background processes should this become necessary. Our object cache (media files you post, your profile avatar and header image, etc.) have been stored locally until November 22nd, 2022 and are stored on Amazon S3 afterwards. We remove media files older than seven days and re-request on demand, e.g. when you read a post that's older. The Elasticsearch full-text search capability is provided by dedicated servers located in Falkenstein, Germany, which we also own and operate. Emails - mainly registration confirmation and welcome - are handled via our own SMTP servers. Prior to November 12th, 2022 we've used SAAS provider Sendinblue for transactional emails. Moderation In order to keep content originating from HOME.social aligned with the Fediverse spirit and our rules, I ask all users (remote and local) to report any issues by using Mastodons built-in reporting features. We strive to make moderation decisions in less than four hours (Mon - Sun, daytime, CET). In urgent cases, you can also send an email to: moderate@home.social and we'll get back to you asap. Backups HOME.social is backed up automatically every day applying a differential backup strategy. These backups include user profile data, posts and all media files and are stored encrypted within the EU in Finland. They do not contain log data or IP addresses. I keep all backups of the past seven days, one backup per week, the newest monthly backup for the past 24 months and a yearly backup "forever". Who is financing this instance? HOME.social is free to use and I make a long-term commitment to keeping it fast and reliable. It is 100% financed by Rottmann Ventures GmbH. Why? I've spent the larger part of my professional life in and around building digital infrastructure and have come to value open source initiatives. This is my way of giving back to the community. I was fortunate enough of being able to sell the two companies I've founded and grown. Since my second exit I no longer am forced to work for money; I sort of retired in my 40s. :) This allows me to focus entirely on stuff that matters to me personally and to spend time with projects like home.social. Who else is moderating? Right now, HOME.social is really just me. However, as the instance hopefully grows, I'm happy for anybody who wants to help. My DMs are open! The server logo is boring... ... it absolutely is. Stay tuned... What about the @admin account? All HOME.social users auto-follow the admin account. While Mastodon has recently introduced an announcement feature, we've found that many third party apps not yet include support for announcements. Even on the native Mastodon web frontend, users tend to overlook important instance related announcements. Therefore, all HOME.social users auto-follow the admin account as it is the only reliable way for us, to reliably communicate instance related updates. Should this - for whatever reason - be against your principles, we kindly encourage you to find a different server. We'd be sorry to see you leave, but we believe it's a small favour to accept for a service we provide for free. Verification My online identities can be verified on Keyoxide. What else should I know? I'm living in a small village near Dortmund with my family and a Parson Russell Terrier called Diego. Attribution Favicons by Nikita Red Squirrel. Contact All local users automatically follow the administrator ( @admin@home.social ). The account is used for important updates and is read-only. If you want to get in touch with a human, you can contact Ralf at any time ( @ralf@home.social ). Ralf is also available via email at ralf@home.social. Imprint Rottmann Ventures GmbH Weiderechteweg 4 44229 Dortmund Germany Email: ralf@home.social Managing Director: Ralf Rottmann VAT ID: DE 264023499 District Court Dortmund, HRB 21872