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My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

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Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#81

Post by catapart »

robolange wrote: post #73
catapart wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How can we make more people self host their data rather than giving it to corporations? Here's my pitch... Sell a productized version of a server that has everything you need to run all of your data-sharing needs already set up with a nice front end that can be operated by a remote control from an HDMI-connected TV. Using that front end, the user connects to the local network, establishes mobile app companions, ente…

I can't count how many hacker conventions over the past 15-20 years I've been to where someone was evangelizing a product that claims to do what you're talking about. So many of these "dead simple" "plug and play" devices. Rarely do they survive more than a year or two before those involved lose interest or give up. They have a very hard time finding a product-market fit in a market of technophiles. They never even c…

Yeah, as someone interested in this kind of thing, I've been hoping someone else would put something together that would work, but I think I share your assumption that this is probably not something that can be made into a product profitable enough to finance a company on.

I will say that, for the most part, these companies try a kind of "lock you in to our product which uses open source" scheme that could never possibly work. And, further, that no one has ever implemented the kind of system that I have in mind that I've seen. But that's not because it's unique or complex, just that it isn't a good path to a minimum viable product, so it isn't a good way to spin up a company quickly.

But yeah; aside from burning through cash in order to build enough coverage (maybe a year of dev just on this; no product dev yet) for a product that you will never actually profit from, I don't see how anyone could bring something like this to market.

All of that aside, a product that can sustain a company is not the only way to have a product exist. Modular productization and loss leading are a couple of ways to envision this. But I'm betting some kind of fractional componentization starts happening that makes this kind of stuff more maintainable. YMMV, though!

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#82

Post by martincmartin »

wccrawford wrote: post #59

I started to look into hosting my own Lemmy instance to have full control over my data and not have to worry about a server shutting down, but after seeing it takes 2-3 docker instances, I decided not to worry about it and let someone else do it.

Couldn't someone make a Docker instance that, inside it, contains the 2-3 other docker instances? I hear it's docker all the way down.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#83

Post by dgellow »

martincmartin wrote: post #82
wccrawford wrote: post #59

I started to look into hosting my own Lemmy instance to have full control over my data and not have to worry about a server shutting down, but after seeing it takes 2-3 docker instances, I decided not to worry about it and let someone else do it.

Couldn't someone make a Docker instance that, inside it, contains the 2-3 other docker instances? I hear it's docker all the way down.

Docker compose makes it relatively easy to coordinate multiple containers. But to answer your actual question, yes, that’s possible though definitely not recommended for standard hosting, it’s called DiD (docker in docker) and is fairly common for CIs.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#84

Post by teddyh »

ggpsv wrote: post #72
jeena wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'm aware of. You'd need to run a reverse proxy somewhere and then point it to your home server as a default but having your other server as a backup running the software at the same time. The big problem is how to store the data on both servers at the same time, especially small texts which are in the database.

Thinking out loud here, but if this is public-facing you can put together a static archive using something like ArchiveBox/SingleFile and have the monitoring server serve the files and update the DNS entry when it detects downtime past a certain threshold.

With the new HTTPS DNS records you could point to the backup server with a lower priority; no need to update the DNS!

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#85

Post by rsynnott »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #37

My problem with fediverse is that is not that well connected. There are some mastodon instances, but I am not sure if you are a user on one instance you have access to other instance. I am not sure if we have fediverse, or if we have isolated siloses. I am asking if that is the case.

> There are some mastodon instances, but I am not sure if you are a user on one instance you have access to other instance.

_In general_ you may assume probably yes. Caveats are if one of the users instances blocks the other one's instances (in practice, rare) or if one or both instances doesn't federate at all (Truth Social and Gab are the big examples of this).

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#86

Post by kstrauser »

dingnuts wrote: post #80
8organicbits wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mastodon is free of censorship It's like email. If you have a server and I have a server we can talk. If one of us uses someone else's server then that server can censor us.

Yeah, but it's email without spam protections of any kind. I ran a homeserver for a little while and didn't want to store the kind of content that came flowing in through the federation endpoints from the moment I interacted with another server. I'm not sure exactly how Mastodon/Pleroma crawl remote homeservers once they're discovered, but I saw a lot of objectionable content on the "Known Network" view from users I…

That's not the default behavior. Mastodon has 3 built-in timelines:

- Your "home" TL with people you follow, and the stuff they post/repost/etc.

- The "local" TL with the users on your server.

- The "federated" TL that's the union of all the people that users on your server follow. Like if you and I are the only 2 people on that instance, and you follow {A, B, C}, and I follow {B, C, D}, then the federated TL will have posts from {A, B, C, D}.

That's it. There's no proactive reaching out and pulling in content from the rest of the fediverse. The one other possibility would be if you configured your instance to use a "relay" of content from other instances you wouldn't normally connect to, which is something optional you have to add.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#87

Post by kstrauser »

kome wrote: post #70

I've tried various Fediverse services such as Mastodon and Lemmy, and, based on my experience, I've noticed a stronger tendency towards censorship, self-censorship, and ingroup behavior. In comparison, platforms like Twitter and Reddit still feel freer. But overall, the best solution is to use your own website for everything. But too much censure really stifles social media.

Instead of "censorship", I'd say "moderation". To pick a random example, suppose you're on an instance run by, and dedicated to, right-wing politics. It may block connections from servers meant for and run by devout communists. The reverse would probably also be true. No one's saying fascists or communists can't run their own server. They're saying "I don't want to hear this stuff".

It's legal to be an anti-Semite, but a Jewish instance doesn't want any of that nonsense. It's legal to be a white supremacist, but a server for black people doesn't want to deal with that trash. On the fediverse, instead of having a one-size-fits-all policy like "all legal speech is allowed" or "no anti-trans content is allowed", each group of users can choose for themselves who they want to talk to.

That's the opposite of censorship. I own a Mastodon instance and I've disconnected quite a few despicable servers, because that's what my users ask me to do. Users who thing I'm too strict or too lenient can move to another server more aligned with their own desires. I'm not denying those other groups the right to publish whatever disagreeable content they wish to. I'm just saying we don't want it here on our server.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#88

Post by sumtechguy »

dsr_ wrote: post #36
pstuart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then a goal should make the responsibility as minimal as possible (buying a box, inserting a thumb drive and answering a few questions and you're off to the races).

You misunderstand. Responsibility cannot be avoided. - power's out at your house. You should have bought a UPS. - internet's out at your house. You should have a router with a backup connection. - security exploit in the wild. You should have configured automatic updates. - update repo changed URLs. You need to change the config. - you enabled open signups, and now strangers are distributing MP3s from your images dir…

self hosting is how much of that are you willing to put up with.

Everything is a possible point of failure. Of those there are those you can control and those you can not. Just adding in a DNS resolver ups the number of possible points of failure by 2. Mix in a proxy server with TLS rewriting. Add in a few more. Add in your docker source of containers is gone more failure. That on top of your usual 'computers are broken in weird ways' most of the time.

Outsourcing that to a 3rd party is tempting, very tempting. But you are also sacrificing other things to do so. So you have to balance those two opposing forces. Sometimes picking up the phone and saying to someone on the other end 'fix it' and they fix it is useful. Other times you digging thru hundreds of forums (or chatgpt these days) and figuring out what is wrong is interesting too and has its uses.

That most people just sign up for something and just want it to work. I totally get.

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#89

Post by nightpool »

dingnuts wrote: post #77
nightpool wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Fediverse is always described with that interconnected diagram where everything talks to each other over ActivityPub. But I never see that in practice. Not sure what you mean by this—it definitely comes up a lot in practice. The top story on HN right now is an example of this in practice—it's a post from social.hackerspace.pl, which has been shared to all of the users followers on different servers. You can tak…

one correction: the Mastodon API is actually more expansive than ActivityPub, not more limited. Pleroma and Misskey implement additional protocols on top of ActivityPub, like WebFinger, in order to be able to federate with Mastodon properly >it also means that some remote content gets "squished" down into that format this is true but it's usually content going the other way: FROM a Mastodon instance TO something like…

By "the Mastodon API" I'm referring to the REST API used by Mastodon clients, not the activitypub "plus" API used by other servers to federate with them.

> FROM a Mastodon instance TO something like WriteFreely that isn't a Twitter clone

I understand that it may appear like that from a user perspective, but from a protocol perspective the ActivityPub representation is strictly more generic and extensible. Both directions (from mastodon and too mastodon) are very, very lossy. All mainstream servers (except maybe pleroma derivatives) do this kind of "squishing", which is a sad reality of client design and not what the ActivityPub spec was intended for

Re: My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy

#90

Post by esbranson »

dingnuts wrote: post #79
esbranson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ActivityPub would not appear to be a focus for the mainline Mastodon team. My tests show that most ActivityPub endpoints of the main Mastodon server software are not CORS enabled so are unreachable by webapps. They are public endpoints and should obviously be CORS enabled. For a HTTP-based protocol, this is a glaring oversight. (It's fixed by at least some other Mastodon servers like Glitch.) Most other ActivityPub i…

The ActivityPub endpoints are not CORS enabled because requests to those endpoints are supposed to come from homeservers, not from users' clients. That's the server-to-server protocol, not the client-to-server protocol.

Mastodon devs admit some endpoints should be CORS enabled, and did so. Whatever you do to make this fact "fit" your logic should be extended to the other endpoints. Glitch already extended it.
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