I started with a $12 droplet and YunoHost. Four years later, I run my entire social media presence on it.

In November 2021, I spun up a $12-a-month DigitalOcean droplet and installed YunoHost on it. I just wanted to play around, see what self-hosting felt like these days. Four years and two server upgrades later, that experiment runs my entire social media presence: Mastodon, Pixelfed, BookWyrm, Castopod, Gitea, and this blog. Soon it’ll run Loops too, a brand new federated short-video platform that’s just coming online.

I didn’t plan any of this. Like most decisions that end up mattering, it started somewhere else entirely.

Two months before I set up that server, I turned fifty. To mark the occasion, I gave myself a gift: ketamine treatments for lifelong depression. The kind that doesn’t respond to the usual interventions. The kind you learn to route around rather than actually fix. The kind that becomes so baseline you forget you’re carrying it until something finally lifts it and you realize, oh, this is what people feel like normally.

The treatments worked. The fog lifted. Colors came back. And one of the first tangible signs that something had changed was that I wanted to build again.

Not code for clients. Not features for deadlines. I wanted to tinker and play and create a digital home that belonged to me. Something I could point to and say: this is mine, I made this, nobody can take it away.

So I installed YunoHost on a small server and started adding apps.

YunoHost makes self-hosting approachable. It’s a Debian-based system with a friendly web interface for managing applications, users, domains, and backups. Install an app, point a subdomain at it, and YunoHost handles the certificates and reverse proxy. All the fiddly bits that usually make self-hosting a headache just… work.

Could I manage all this myself? Sure. I’ve been a full-stack developer for over forty years. I could wrangle nginx configs and Let’s Encrypt renewals and database backups manually. But the combination of a semi-managed VPS at DigitalOcean and a maintained app management system like YunoHost hits a sweet spot. I get ownership and control without spending my weekends on sysadmin busywork. As my usage grew, I bumped up the server twice and added automated backups. The costs crept up a bit, but the ease stayed the same.

It’s also open source and community-driven. People package apps, maintain integrations, help each other in the forums. I ended up contributing too—I wrote the BookWyrm integration that’s now used by plenty of other YunoHost deployments. When Loops stabilizes enough, I’ll probably package that one myself.

Twitter’s long decline had already started my migration. I’d been on the platform since its earliest days, watching it gradually curdle. When ownership changed in late 2022, I already had somewhere to go.

My Mastodon instance at toots.kestrelsnest.social was running. My Pixelfed at pix.kestrelsnest.social was ready for photos. I could leave without losing connections entirely—the fediverse meant I could still follow and be followed by people scattered across other servers.

Then Facebook and Instagram started their own collapse, and I was glad I’d gotten ahead of it. My data lived on my server, in my database, in my storage. The platforms could implode and I’d still have everything.

The sidebar on this blog lists where you can find me online. Almost every link points to a subdomain of kestrelsnest.social. Mastodon for microblogging, Pixelfed for photos, BookWyrm for tracking what I’m reading, Castopod for podcasting whenever I get around to it, Gitea for my code repositories.

I grew up on the old web, where you could have a home on the internet that actually belonged to you. I ran this blog on my own server through the first decade of the 2000s. Then I got lazy, let Twitter and Facebook become my default, and watched years of my words disappear into timelines I didn’t control.

Self-hosting is just going back to what the web was supposed to be.

Could you do this yourself? Maybe. YunoHost really does lower the barrier. A basic VPS, a domain name, and a weekend can get you running. Their forums are helpful when you get stuck. And you can always find me at any of my socials if you want to ask questions. You don’t need decades of experience, just patience and a willingness to learn.

The real question is whether you care enough about owning your data to invest the time. The corporate platforms will always be more convenient if all you want is to post and scroll. That convenience has costs, though. You just won’t know the full price until it’s too late.

I’m glad I started when I did. The infrastructure was already in place when the platforms started crumbling. Every time I add a new app—BookWyrm last year, Loops coming soon—I’m building out a space that can weather whatever collapse comes next.

The ketamine treatments were the gift I gave myself for turning fifty. The server might be the gift that lasts longest.