What We Are Building

Because RSocial keeps your data on hardware you own, that hardware should be dependable, quiet, and cheap to run — something you can leave switched on in a corner and forget about. A fanless design means no moving parts and no noise; low power draw means it costs very little to keep running around the clock. And because it's purpose-built for RSocial, much of the fiddly setup is handled for you, turning "host your own social network" into something closer to "plug it in." Everything the security pages describe — local storage, encrypted backups, secure login — runs on this device, under your control. See Your Data & Ownership for what that means.

The reason a small board like a Raspberry Pi is enough comes back to the architecture: RSocial is a set of lightweight services and two efficient databases (a graph store for your posts and SQLite for accounts and media), none of which needs a data centre to run well for a personal community. A fanless node draws only a few watts — comparable to a phone charger — so leaving it on around the clock costs very little and makes no noise. The Mini-PC Node's job is to take the parts that can be fiddly to set up by hand — installing the services, wiring them together, preparing storage — and have them ready out of the box, so "run your own social network" becomes genuinely approachable rather than a weekend project.

On mainstream platforms, everyone's feed looks identical because the look serves the company, not you. RSocial takes the opposite view: since the instance is yours, its appearance should be too. Themes range from bold looks like Midnight Amethyst to nostalgic retro styles and clean, soft minimalist interfaces — and because RSocial already supports light and dark modes, a theme simply builds on that foundation. It's a small thing that makes a self-hosted community feel like a genuine home rather than a template.

Because the interface is a web app styled with standard techniques, a theme is really just a coordinated set of colours, type, and surface styles applied across the whole app at once — not a fragile skin bolted on top. That's why themes can range so widely without breaking anything, and why they build cleanly on the light and dark modes RSocial already ships with. Down the line it also opens the door to communities crafting and sharing their own looks, so the character of a space can reflect the people in it rather than a single corporate template imposed on everyone.

Self-hosting on your own device is the most private option, but it isn't for everyone — some people would rather not maintain physical hardware. Managed Regional Hosting is aimed at them: a dedicated instance running on remote hardware, configured and encrypted for you, so you skip the maintenance while still getting your own separate instance rather than a shared corporate platform. The trade-offs between self-hosting and managed hosting — and the responsibilities that come with each — are covered on Self-Hosting & FAQ.

It's worth being clear about what "managed" changes and what it doesn't. What changes is where the box physically sits and who keeps the operating system patched and the certificate renewed — the maintenance chores move off your plate. What doesn't change is the shape of the deal: you still get your own dedicated instance with your own data, encrypted in transit and in backups, rather than an account on a shared platform mining you for ads. It's a different point on the same line — a little less hands-on control in exchange for a lot less upkeep — and, unlike a mainstream service, moving between the two later is straightforward because your data travels in open formats.