Take back control of your data

📝 🔒 👪

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What’s the problem?

Modern social media platforms rely on personalised advertising. They are designed with two purposes:

1. 📋 Collect and analyse as much user-data as possible
2. ⌚ Keep the user engaged as long as possible

This leads to a time-consuming and stressful user experience that is fraught with relentless notifications, addictive recommendation algorithms, dangerous echo-chambers, and harmful fixations on numbers (likes, followers etc).

How is Hosta different?

Hosta is a different type of social media to the ones you usually install on your phone. Defining features of the Hosta network:

• Users are in direct control of their data
• All communications are end-to-end encrypted
• There is no central server that controls the network

All of this makes Hosta ideal for private, secure, and censorship resistant communications.

Furthermore, Hosta is not incentivised to maximise user attention - there are no intrusive advertisements, greedy shareholders, or creepy trackers.

What do I need to get started?

Each user should have an always-on device (called a node) to host their content on. The node controls all of the user’s data - it stores posts and comments, and controls who can see them. For beginners, a Raspberry Pi + Ubuntu is recommended.

They can use a client program to view the posts, comments, and profiles of users on the network. At the moment, only a Windows 10 client is in the works - however, more platforms may be supported in the future.

Run 🏃

Node

This section will guide you through the process of running a Hosta node. It is recommended to use a Raspberry Pi running Ubuntu.

1. Install Dependencies

• Linux: Install Docker Engine and Docker Compose
• Windows / MacOS: Install Docker Desktop

2. Download the configuration folder

Download the latest node.zip file, unzip it to a directory of your choosing, and cd into the node folder. Running dir (Windows) or ls -a (Linux) should show three files in the current directory:

• .env
• docker-compose.yml
• README.md

3. Run

Run the following command:

docker-compose up

You can stop the service with Ctrl+C.

4. Update

Update the node at any time by running docker pull mileswatson/hosta:node and then restarting the container.

Client

This section will guide you through the process of running a Hosta node. Currently, the client can only be run on Windows.

1. Download the executable

Download the latest client.zip file, and unzip it to a directory of your choosing.

2. Run

Run the executable through a terminal, or by double clicking it in the file explorer.
If running through the terminal, the default save folder can be provided with ./ClientWPF.exe PATH_TO_DATA_FOLDER.

In order to connect the client to your node, you must select a folder that has a client.identity file identical to that of the node.identity.
You can do this by copying the node.identity file from the node folder over to the client folder (perhaps using a USB), before renaming it to client.identity).

You must also enter the IP address of your node - if running on the same computer, you can leave this as 127.0.0.1.

3. Update

Currently, the client program must be updated manually - replace the current executable with the executable from the latest client.zip release.