Right now superstimul.us is hosted on a Vultr VPS instance. I use Vultr because it's a decently reliable VPS host that offers OpenBSD (though this instance is running in Docker on a Debian system). Much cheaper than AWS; comparable pricing and features with many other VPS providers.

But I just went looking at the prices of competitors, and Hetzner is cheap. How is it so cheap? For roughly the same price I'm paying for this host, I could get ~8x the vCPUs and RAM, and 4x the storage.

It would be a hassle to migrate at this point, but I'm definitely tempted.

I think groups are a pretty half-baked feature, and I don't expect people to use them much. A "group" (previously called a "forum", and most of the documentation hasn't been updated to reflect this change) is basically an account that auto-reshares things it's tagged in. You can give it a few different settings for how it responds to follow requests, and another setting for the visibility of its reshares. To administer a group, you have to create a second account for it (which friendica does make relatively easy but not trivial), and then switch to being logged-in "as" the group.

So, yeah I guess it might be useful for coordinating things somehow, and the setting with private reshares is maybe promising (though also marked "experimental"). But it seems much less natural to me than the corresponding concept on Facebook.

• Tailscale: Lightweight personal VPNs. Tailscale is so good. I don't even need to have an open ssh port on the VPS running this instance, because I can connect over tailscale SSH with zero hassle.
• Caddy: Caddy is like nginx if nginx cared about usability. e.g. it makes it trivial to put an HTTP service behind a TLS proxy. Like, it even manages the LetsEncrypt certificate for you. Totally wild.
• Docker, and the official Friendica images especially: I hate developing for containers, and avoid it when possible. But when someone else has put in the effort to make a high-quality container image, deployment is genuinely much easier, even for hosting the thing on a VPS.

Thanks to everyone who's joined to help beta test! I'm very grateful y'all are here! ❤️

My basic plan is to use superstimul.us for the next week, posting here instead of Facebook, getting a sense of the platform so that I can help other people later, and trying to iron out basic issues if they crop up.

After that, I'm going to do a push to invite clusters of people who I'm especially excited about being here. I'll probably reach out to y'all for names of people who are cruxy for your active enjoyment/participation here (feel free to preemptively message me about this!).

Anybody can invite their friends, btw, though I would slightly prefer you held off for now, because I want to be strategic about the launch.

I might do some kind of incentive / costly-signaling scheme where I give $20 or so to the first 30 people who share a substantive post here, and not on other social media? Or something; Not sure about that yet.