I have talked extensively about the fediverse, the decentral web, FAAMG alternatives and big tech censorship. My blogs offer a compelling overview and I have done work & stories for Robert David Steele about the decentral web. So you may ask yourself, after all this talk about going decentral and web 3.0, how do you do it Steven?

This guide is meant to give an answer to that. And I will try to get as clear and as dummy-proof as I can get. This is intended to be a one-stop shop from A to Z. I might forget a thing or two along the way so this will probably receive some updates in the near future.

To begin you will need hardware to run this on

Get a Raspberry pi or another arm device at your local hardware shop. To help you, I have selected an option that can service you everywhere in the world. The store has a handy starters package with everything included to get you going straight away. This is your server hardware. The raspberry pi 4 4GB is recommended as it will answer to most if not all your needs.

The next part is software. We will be using the YUNOhost distro as this already offers everything we need in 1 package. Please download it here. If you click on the step 0 or download button, you will see plenty of other server options. This is all very well documented. Here you can see all the possible applications that can run on YUNOhost.

Installation

Next question, how do we get this distro onto our raspberry pi server? Answer: we will burn it on the SD card with the Rufus program. You can get Rufus here. And it’s pretty straightforward to use. If your computer or laptop has a SD card reader, you need to insert the micro-sd card into the  sd-adapter and into the sd reader slot. Then select the right options in Rufus, select your downloaded YUNOhost img file and click start. At finish it will display a message.

After this is done, take the SD card out of your laptop, take the micro-sd card out of the adapter and start assembling your raspberry pi computer hardware. The packages comes with instructions included so this should be straightforward. Put in the micro-sd card in the slot of the raspi and power it up.

Yunohost will automatically start setting itself up for about 10 or more minutes. Along the way, it might ask some questions or input. It is always wise to connect a keyboard and mouse to the raspberry pi in this stage of the process.

Connect the systems

After all the configuration of Yunohost is done, it is time to think of the next part of our web 3.0 journey.
To make your server available to the internet, we need to establish a chain of working components.
First you need a domain name (eg a website address). Get one either from your ISP, hosting or another domain selling company. Secondly, you need to connect that domain to a free dyndns service.

This document provides a good solid explanation: https://yunohost.org/#/dns_dynamicip

It is worth the read. If your ISP router does not provide a dyndns option, we can install this on Yunohost ourselves using this command:

sudo apt-get install ddclient

To do this, get Putty here, install it and connect to your Yunohost. Follow this guide https://yunohost.org/#/ssh

Configuration

So now that you have setup Yunohost, surf to the server web address or IP and login. Here the remaining configuration will take place. Also, you can install all the desired apps and packages already prepped ready to go with a single click.

From here on you are on your own, providing an install or use guide for the ins and outs for every app and software the project has available, is too far out of this scope and frankly ridiculous. In any case it is very wise to do your homework and research throughout the process, so that you know what you are doing and not just point and click.

So, enjoy your newly setup web 3.0 server.