Federated Services are services which many instances form a network to provide a greater whole than the sum of their parts, each participant in the Fediverse is an “instance”. A message or other item made available on one instance is visible and available on other instances.

We make these services available to all people who do not abuse it in order to promote the values of Free Speech, and those of the United States Constitution First Amendment. A free republic is not possible without free speech and commercial mainstream media do not provide it. We also get some advertisement benefit from hosting these, it is our hope that people who see how fast and responsible our services are will decide to do hosting or use other paid services here.

There are numerous federated services available, we offer Macrobloging platform Friendica, Hubzilla; Microbloging services Mastodon, Misskey, a federated search engine, Yacy, and a federated cloud service, Nextcloud.

Macrobloging services are message systems that allow long form posts similar in format to Facebook. These allow for works of fiction, poetry, technical papers, news items, short stories, and more. These formats are most useful for discussion of social issues.

Microbloging services allow only short form posts similar in format to Twitter. While you can link to larger articles elsewhere, you have a relatively short character limit and so can not post them directly.

Censorship, is handled much different on the fediverse than on mainstream media like Twitter or Facebook. On the fediverse, each individual instance is responsible for content available on that instance, but does not censor the rest of the network. Thus if you find the rules of one instance too constraining you can move to another.

Federated search engines are analogous to federated message systems in that each instance chooses what portion of the internet it wants to crawl. When you enter a search term, the local instance queries all of the federated instances, collates and sorts the results and presents them to you. As with messages, each instance can have it’s own censorship policies but no one instance can censor the entire network.

Given the wild-west nature of the fediverse, it is probably not suitable for children under 14, and you’re guaranteed to find some material that will offend virtually everyone. With federated search engines, material that is inappropriate will usually be flagged sensitive or nsfw (not safe for work) so as long as you don’t expand material marked as such, you can avoid this sort of material. There are occasionally people who violate these rules, we do our best to remove such individuals none the less some will get through.

We offer the following federated services:

Friendica.Eskimo.Com
Friendica is a decentralized long format macrobloging message network. It is similar in format to facebook however there is no centralized censorship. Also, it is able to federate with all other federated message systems which use ActivityPub protocol and also we have extensions that allow it to speak to several other networks via other protocols.

Hubzilla.Eskimo.Com
Hubzilla is similar in message format to Friendica in that it allows long posts. However, it specializes in it’s ability to provide connectivity to multiple protocols and so we include it in our mix of federated services primarily for the better connectivity it offers. Hubzilla provides a great deal of interoperability between many networks though ActivityPub is still it’s primary protocol. Hubzilla gives you a greater degree of control over privacy than some of the other networks. You can create private channels that are served between hubzilla instances and other compatible instances.

Mastodon.Eskimo.Com
Mastodon is first and foremost an alternative to Twitter. While Twitter has Tweets, Mastodon has Toots. The format is very similar. Mastodon toots have a limit of 500 characters. Similar to the short limit of Twitter. This is why this platform is referred to as a Microbloging format. Mastodon interacts with other ActivityPub instances however when a long form blog post from another instance arrives, you are only shown a short portion with a link to follow to see the full post on the originating site.

NextCloud.Eskimo.Com
If you are a customer of Eskimo North, your login credentials will work without a domain extension to access Nextcloud. If you are not a customer you can apply for a Nextcloud account using your choice of login and password, in this case the login should include your originating network. Some features require an Eskimo North shell account to take full advantage of.

Pixelfed.Eskimo.Com
Pixelfed is a federated pixel gallery. A place where you can share your photos to the widest audience possible, and you can view what others have shared. Instance is new as of April 6th, 2025.

Yacy.Eskimo.Com
Yacy is a federated search engine. There are several thousand instances on the Internet. Each instances crawls whatever portion of the web the administrator requested. It is also possible for the administrator of a site with relatively few resources to request a larger site to do crawls on their behalf. Unfortunately, it does not provide a method for an end user to initiate a crawl, but if you send e-mail to support@eskimo.com and request a crawl, we will initiate a crawl on your behalf.

If you enjoy these services, please consider supporting us by taking advantage of our paid services: https://www.eskimo.com/

Shell Accounts
A shell is a command line interface for an operating system. With most shell providers, a command line interface on one flavor of Linux or Unix is all you get. Eskimo North provides access to eight different popular Linux distributions and SunOS Unix. Eskimo North also full remote desktop capabilities using X2Go with sound, and also NX, VNC, and RPD without sound.

Account Types
We offer four different levels of shell accounts: Economy, Standard, Power, and Enterprise. Background tasks such as IRC bots, Game Servers, and the like are permitted on all account types except student. IRC servers are not permitted because of their tendency to draw denial of service attacks. Standard, Power, Enterprise, and Super-Max shells include a MySQL database allowing you to run a variety of LAMP stack based applications on your website and to use non-web based applications that require a database.

Web Hosting
Web hosting under our domain is provided with all shell accounts. You can host your own domains with virtual domains or web hosting packages.

Remote Desktop
Remote desktop capability is like having a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers plugged right into our servers. Because our servers can be accessed anywhere in the world, this allows you to have a work environment you can access from anywhere in the world without risking losing your files to a laptop, tablet, or phone thief. We offer remote desktop capabilities on all of our shell servers except for the SunOS server. We support x2go, nx, vnc, and rdp protocols. X2go is the best choice as it provides extremely efficient compression and X round trip removal as well as sound.

Applications
Applications include Office Suites such as Libre Office and Caligra (which can read and write Microsoft Office file formats), Web and Program Development tools such as Bluefish Editor as well as many other editors, compilers, interpreters, scripting languages, debuggers, profilers, and online documentation.

E-mail
Our e-mail system offers unprecedented flexibility. You can access your mail via shell mail readers including graphical mailers like Thunderbird, or via Web mail, or via pop-3 and imap mail protocols, complete with TLS encryption. Our mail system includes Bayesian filtering with Spam Assassin which can be individually configured for your needs. Procmail allows you to sort and process mail automatically. Smartlist allows you to maintain mailing lists.

Security
Access to all of our servers is available via strong encryption. The shell servers all support ssh access. All of the remote desktop protocols tunnel via ssh. We maintain all of our servers up to date keep with the latest patches. Backups are made weekly.

Eskimo North has been providing Unix timeshare services since 1985. We have been providing Linux timeshare, shell access, web hosting, e-mail, and Internet services since 1992. Please take a look at our services as they support our free Federated services including Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Nextcloud, Pixelfed, and Yacy Search.