Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

alice.bsky.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 83 posts

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#61

Post by nightpool »

steveklabnik wrote: post #48
nightpool wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding though is that having a PDS on its own is useless without an AppView to collect the data from the relay? Or am I misunderstanding the architecture here? https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-archit...

I'm talking about the case where you wanted to run your own PDS and use all of the other infrastructure being run by Bluesky. If you fully want your own copy of everything, then you'd want to run a copy of everything. But you don't have to. It really depends on what your goals are. That's why the post is about the maximal scenario. "Just your own PDS" is the minimalist scenario. But I think it's the one that makes se…

Right, and I'm saying "surely there must be a middle ground between "using all of Bluesky's infrastructure" and "having a 4.5tb copy of every post ever made on the network""

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#62

Post by mdaniel »

Also, yesterday someone posted[1] https://frontpage.fyi/ which seems like it's predominately Bluesky/ATprotocol news but since both of those interest me, if this blog link interests you then so might that link. It logs in with Bsky oauth2 federation

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42081210

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#63

Post by benharri »

dawnerd wrote: post #54
zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Selfhosting is my hobby but I am also an SRE. I am hesitant to do this because the instruction is "too easy" -- "Simply open your firewall, download and run this installer.sh with sudo on your server and that's it!"[1]. How do I secure the webserver and the data? Where is the data on my disk? How to backup and restore? High availability? There might be detailed documentation somewhere, or I can even read the code. Bu…

I was about to do this as well but their installer sketched me out. Why can't it just be some easy to follow docker instructions? They use docker too but instructions to set it up on your own is basically "read the installer script". Meanwhile mastodon is incredibly easy to self host w/ relays.

i certainly wouldn't say mastodon easy to self host

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#64

Post by freedomben »

zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Selfhosting is my hobby but I am also an SRE. I am hesitant to do this because the instruction is "too easy" -- "Simply open your firewall, download and run this installer.sh with sudo on your server and that's it!"[1]. How do I secure the webserver and the data? Where is the data on my disk? How to backup and restore? High availability? There might be detailed documentation somewhere, or I can even read the code. Bu…

Same, exactly. I would so much rather be given a docker-compose or k8s yaml along with some other tidbits like how to run migrations and stuff, than get a bash script I can just run. I've been doing this long enough to know that it's not initial setup work that really matters, it's the upgrade and backup/restore story that really matters. If your bash script just pulls and runs a docker container or something then cool, but if it's doing much more than that then that's a big red flag to me.

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#65

Post by j45 »

zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Selfhosting is my hobby but I am also an SRE. I am hesitant to do this because the instruction is "too easy" -- "Simply open your firewall, download and run this installer.sh with sudo on your server and that's it!"[1]. How do I secure the webserver and the data? Where is the data on my disk? How to backup and restore? High availability? There might be detailed documentation somewhere, or I can even read the code. Bu…

This message is for anyone who might find trying self-hosting intimidating.

Like hosting an application in the cloud, you also will never stop improving how you self-host.

If there's questions lacking about a software package, it's often could be reflected in your self-hosting environment too.

Running this type of an installer is excellent to quickly introduce yourself to any technology - to then start learning about how you want to run it long term.

The questions expressed above are not new. How SRE's solve it today also can be different and more complicated than needed.

Easy answer - if they have an install script, it's getting run inside a VM, or Docker which itself is a baseline backup and HA automatically if needed.

If generally anything is run inside of a self-hosted hypervisor like Proxmox, it can be setup to automatically backup, mirror, HA as-is, while you figure out what you want. This includes running docker inside a Proxmox VM, there is not a big performance hit anymore for doing this for things that are largely idle most of the time.

There is a big difference between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. It's easier and easier to get the benefits from all three by being willing to build up the foundation instead of pointing at the gaps in each package for not filling it for you.

It's encouraging to see things becoming more possible :)

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#66

Post by j45 »

dawnerd wrote: post #54
zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Selfhosting is my hobby but I am also an SRE. I am hesitant to do this because the instruction is "too easy" -- "Simply open your firewall, download and run this installer.sh with sudo on your server and that's it!"[1]. How do I secure the webserver and the data? Where is the data on my disk? How to backup and restore? High availability? There might be detailed documentation somewhere, or I can even read the code. Bu…

I was about to do this as well but their installer sketched me out. Why can't it just be some easy to follow docker instructions? They use docker too but instructions to set it up on your own is basically "read the installer script". Meanwhile mastodon is incredibly easy to self host w/ relays.

An installer script is often an early step, and much better than nothing... as well as a step towards docker.

Here's the kicker, the install script could be called from a Dockerfile pretty easily, no? Sure, there might be things to sort out, but it doesn't seem unreasonable.

I agree having a docker image is super handy and can be quick to try, as well as update, and put into a larger self-hosted environment how you need.

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#67

Post by diggan »

zzyzxd wrote: post #46

Selfhosting is my hobby but I am also an SRE. I am hesitant to do this because the instruction is "too easy" -- "Simply open your firewall, download and run this installer.sh with sudo on your server and that's it!"[1]. How do I secure the webserver and the data? Where is the data on my disk? How to backup and restore? High availability? There might be detailed documentation somewhere, or I can even read the code. Bu…

> How do I secure the webserver and the data? Where is the data on my disk? How to backup and restore? High availability?

I feel like that it's kind of out of the scope from an article describing the steps for application/protocol specific infrastructure. You need to look for resources, guides and such for general self-hosting instead, somewhere else.

For example, if you use TrueScale NAS/unraid/proxmos or whatever for local self-hosting, you'd setup those things via those platforms. If you use Kubernetes/Nomad/Incus/Containers, you'd solve those things via that tooling.

Re: How to self-host all of Bluesky except the AppView (for now)

#70

Post by lisowski »

nightpool wrote: post #61
steveklabnik wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about the case where you wanted to run your own PDS and use all of the other infrastructure being run by Bluesky. If you fully want your own copy of everything, then you'd want to run a copy of everything. But you don't have to. It really depends on what your goals are. That's why the post is about the maximal scenario. "Just your own PDS" is the minimalist scenario. But I think it's the one that makes se…

Right, and I'm saying "surely there must be a middle ground between "using all of Bluesky's infrastructure" and "having a 4.5tb copy of every post ever made on the network""

What exactly would that be?

I feel like the middle ground your talking about could be just a feed?

A feed is: a server that consumes the firehose and decided on whether to store posts, when loaded in the app it returns some post to create a feed

So essentially you only store references to part of the network rather than storing the whole thing

Post reply on HN