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Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

blog.alexgleason.me

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Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#131

Post by generj »

rvz wrote: post #130
rvz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like 4chan, Gab also survived the de-platforming witch hunt and are self-hosting almost everything.

To Downvoters: So the above statement is somehow 'false' and 4chan and Gab are NOT self-hosting and are in the same situation like Parler which is still down? Does anyone have concrete evidence that contradicts the parent AND the grandparent statements? Or is it just the emotional reaction to two websites that one just felt the need to downvote a fact without reason or counter evidence? Let's not get any form of irra…

I think people are responding to language like “wannabe-stasi deplatform mob” and “de-platforming witch hunt” more than the actual facts or websites involved.

That language is not neutral, so the response isn’t surprising.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#132

Post by [deleted] »

rvz wrote: post #130
rvz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like 4chan, Gab also survived the de-platforming witch hunt and are self-hosting almost everything.

To Downvoters: So the above statement is somehow 'false' and 4chan and Gab are NOT self-hosting and are in the same situation like Parler which is still down? Does anyone have concrete evidence that contradicts the parent AND the grandparent statements? Or is it just the emotional reaction to two websites that one just felt the need to downvote a fact without reason or counter evidence? Let's not get any form of irra…

[deleted]

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#133

Post by skynet-9000 »

jette_au_loin wrote: post #101
joezydeco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (‪@brokep‬) 1/10/21, 03:05 "The pirate bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost 2 decades. Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing. The most ironic thing is that TPBs enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian…

It's probably easier to host a website serving a bunch of .torrent files. There's dozens of those around.

Or just magnet links.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#134

Post by 542458 »

devwastaken wrote: post #118
Balgair wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any good resources to share?

Not the poster but I assume an easy setup is simply ubuntu server, nginx, get a domain and put it on cloudflare free plan, setup a script that updates your home IP to cloudflare dns records. Then do letsencrypt for the https cert, setup automatic renewal, and you're probably good.

Bang on - that’s exactly my setup. Only thing I’m also using is PM2 for node script management.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#135

Post by Balgair »

542458 wrote: post #134
devwastaken wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the poster but I assume an easy setup is simply ubuntu server, nginx, get a domain and put it on cloudflare free plan, setup a script that updates your home IP to cloudflare dns records. Then do letsencrypt for the https cert, setup automatic renewal, and you're probably good.

Bang on - that’s exactly my setup. Only thing I’m also using is PM2 for node script management.

Any good resources on how to go about implementing this?

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#136

Post by amachefe »

devwastaken wrote: post #115

"I'm eager to give big social media sites like Facebook and Twitter a run for their money." Hosting servers isn't the hard part, and it isnt the same as running a social media platform. This blog is riddled with neivete and a misuse of the word "fear" to get clicks. Don't even get me started on trying to use the "they didn't come for me" quote when relating to online posts . Government != Private companies If you wan…

Parler problem was not all the things you listed, it was simple hosting and the blog provided very clear steps to go about it

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#137

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

4cao wrote: post #122
paul_f wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they didn't think they needed to. Before a few months ago, you didn't yank someone off your network because you didn't like their politics. (yea yea, terms of service something or other)

> Before a few months ago, you didn't yank someone off your network because you didn't like their politics. AWS dropped WikiLeaks as a customer back in 2010 for political reasons, and apparently this was announced by a US senator even before AWS did so themselves: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/12/01/wikileaks.amazon/index....

Cloudflare and Daily Stormer is another good example. The mistake there was the implication that Cloudflare was endorsing the stormer rather then being a neutral carrier and Cloudflare shut down that idea quickly. I have to applaud them, it’s hard to be neutral in the US, everything is “with us or against us.” People watch too many gangster movies I think.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#138

Post by amachefe »

Very good one, and timely

It's been an obsession of mine for a long while, and i am overjoyed it has been written down

I have not been comfortable with the Cloud or nothing and the fact that it looks like it no longer possible.

This video also helps for people who want to go into self hosting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx_vGdnBqeE

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#139

Post by hansvm »

ralusek wrote: post #92
tpmx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it works. So much money is wasted with AWS. (Look at at their margins.) It's useful in development/testing. It's irresponsible to use managed services that don't have an easy migration path to something open.

Them having margins in no way means it's a waste of money. That's not how things work. It would cost just companies so much more money for the devops team needed to achieve parity with the services they provide. Do you look at a car manufacturer, see that they're making a profit, and assume "I could clearly build a comparable car for less money?"

Them having gigantic margins (e.g. 4x or more on network egress) can mean that any one use case might be better satisfied with something slightly more custom, especially if we stop pretending that administering an AWS account is free and that the overlap between what we need and what AWS offers is perfect.

On both sides of this, the thing to do is to critically examine your needs and decide if one or another solution fits. AWS can be a game changer for some companies and an immensely complicated money sink that never gets good enough performance for others.

Re: Parler’s epic fail: A crash course on running your own servers

#140

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

rualca wrote: post #112
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #63

This article is kind of depressing, when did hosting your own server become a lost art? One of parler’s problems was they didn’t scrub headers which made it very obvious they were using AWS and which AWS services they were using. AWS is just a bunch of APIs - they could have colo’d their front end or put a bunch of varnish servers in front if it at a colo and nobody would have been the wiser they were using AWS on th…

> AWS is just a bunch of APIs This is a gross oversimplification of what AWS is. For starters, no one pays for AWS for the APIs. People do pay AWS for the on-demand infrastructure, and the global network of datacenters, which makes it trivial to setup a highly-availiable web application distributed globally. AWS allows you to put your highly-availablr global application together by click-click-clicking on dashboards,…

Actually my assessment it is spot on. AWS is just a bunch of APIs, you don’t need to be inside a VPC to use them, you can call them from anywhere. If you wanted to hide your usage of AWS you could stick a varnish server in Digital Ocean or any other cloud or colo provider and have it make signed requests to your S3 bucket, or lambda, or a traditional load balancer fronting http servers. People might know or suspect you were using AWS but if they can’t tie you to specific account then it’s hard to get you shut down. It’s always possible that someone could bribe someone at your CDN or colo to lookup origin ips but even then you could plan for that and put your data stores in a separate account so that even if your http server account is shut down, you can spin up another AWS account for the http servers and your back in business.

From a technical standpoint I think half the fun of working for Parler would have been evading the left’s efforts to take them down. I don’t know who they hired for technology but they lacked spirit in addition to fundamentals! ;)

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