I've had a pretty good experience self-hosting with Pleroma. Its quite amazing that I can run a social media server with just a $5 VPS.
Not sure if there are bots / apps that can easily let you follow Twitter users on Mastodon, but I've definitely seen mastodon - twitter crossposter apps before.
What do you mean? No content other than what your users generate will be hosted on your instance.
There is a concept of a federated timeline, which does get synced to your local instance. If you follow someone on a remote instance, that instance feeds content into your instance so it can be loaded.
It syncs the people you follow, right? So presumably the only additional content on your instance is content from the people you follow, which should generally be low-risk.
You can also block just media if an instance is known to host images that are illegal in your country or your users don't want to see (silencing is a better option for the latter tho).
I believe once you follow someone, you become federated with their instance. and you potentially receive all content from that instance... I think?
there are also admin controls for managing moderation and federation.
Re:Mastodon and Keybase
by JoshTriplett on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @03:35PM
(#19676595)
I still don't want to host anyone else's content, for much the same reason I'm never going to have an unmoderated comment system on a site.
I'd love to self-host a Mastodon instance that two-way mirrors my Twitter account and acts as a Twitter client (letting me pseudo-follow folks from Twitter). But in any case, I'd want to ensure that no content from people I follow gets mirrored/hosted on my own instance; the only content actually hosted on my own instance should be the content I post.