[HN Gopher] Notes on running a single-person Mastodon server
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Notes on running a single-person Mastodon server
Author : hasheddan
Score : 120 points
Date : 2023-08-12 13:04 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jvns.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (jvns.ca)
| riffic wrote:
| folks (or organizations!) can just as easily run a wordpress
| instance with the ActivityPub plugin, it's a lot less messier
| than a full on rails app.
|
| The plugin is maintained directly by Automattic, as a plus:
|
| https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/03/17/making-the-social-web-...
| Zak wrote:
| I self-host both Mastodon and Wordpress. I don't recall one
| being much more effort than the other, though this is on a VPS
| that did not previously have PHP installed so that might skew
| things a little.
|
| I did try setting up the ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress and
| was not successful in getting other ActivityPub servers to talk
| to it. It's been a while and Automattic now contributes to the
| plugin so it might be worth a second try.
|
| Edit: gave it a second try and it seems to work without any
| fuss.
| thih9 wrote:
| The article addresses that:
|
| > I chose to run a Mastodon server (instead of some other
| ActivityPub implementation) because Mastodon is the most
| popular one. Good managed Mastodon hosting is readily
| available, there are tons of options for client apps, and I
| know for sure that my server will work well with other people's
| servers.
| mid-kid wrote:
| I've been musing doing this as well, as I really can't find a
| mastodon server with a ruleset and community that I like, but I'm
| worried about the required drive space. Are there any affordable
| VPS hosts that would provide enough storage for a comfortable
| single-user mastodon instance?
| jedimastert wrote:
| What's the order of magnitude for space? I feel like it
| wouldn't be very much at all.
| gidorah wrote:
| I would imagine that a small VPS would be fine, so long as you
| were on top of the data storage. I'm running a single user
| Masto instance on an NUC. i5, 8GB RAM that I bought for PS65.
| I'm not exactly sure my home upload speeds, but they can't be
| huge.
|
| It's currently using 6GB of storage on media. It is currently
| set to autodelete, but I assume could grow quite a bit.
|
| I can't say Icve noticed any performance issues, however, I
| suspect I'm a lighter user.
| omoikane wrote:
| [flagged]
| mid-kid wrote:
| And that's probably what bothers me most about the fediverse in
| general. I want to be able to see everything, be it appropriate
| or not, misinformation or harassment, but the only servers that
| allow that are those that are suspended everywhere themselves.
| Unfortunately, those are also the kinds of servers crawling
| with people that I wouldn't want to be associated with.
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| just went to check on what pawoo[.]net is and didn't even need
| to scroll to see child sexual abuse media
|
| searching ddg for pawoo shows this is not news for anyone so i
| find it strange that you would even bother question why any
| other server would accept federate with it
|
| and how the fuck isn't this comment deleted yet? dang?
| omoikane wrote:
| If the way you use social networks is to view the live feed
| of all posts by all users and pick out the ones most
| offensive to you, I am afraid you are going to have a bad
| time.
|
| A better way is to ignore the live feed (or
| suggested/recommended/featured/etc) and only follow the users
| you are interested in. I am not on pawoo.net, but it has a
| lot of artists that I would like to follow and couldn't
| follow them from mastodon.social.
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| the live feed is the first thing i saw; a ddg search
| indicates more people are aware of it
|
| i'm starting to question if you are arguing in good faith
| [deleted]
| Doches wrote:
| > how the fuck isn't this comment deleted yet? dang?
|
| There's no CSAM in the /comment/, just a lament that
| masotodon.social and pawoo don't federate with each other.
| Want to take action against a service you find (extremely)
| distasteful? Great, take action -- dig through their DNS,
| figure out where their servers are hosted, talk to the FBI.
| But invoking /dang/ to do something about it (to...protect
| the emotionally fragile HN community from being exposed to
| the existing of something vile?) just isn't that action.
|
| I for damn sure won't defend the folks running pawoo, but we
| ought to defend to the death omoikane's right to talk about
| it. Free speech runs both ways, and sometimes that sucks.
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| s/deleted/redacted/
|
| look, it's my fault for clicking on a blurred image, on a
| site i didn't know
|
| i just did not expect that stuff on the first hop out of hn
| throwaway_4749 wrote:
| I can understand why you would disagree, but curious why you
| think that comment needs to be deleted? Do you really think
| we not only need to criminalize digital paintings you don't
| like, but even mentioning them?
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| i want to be very clear that what i clicked on was not a
| painting/cartoon/manga-drawing
|
| when i wrote child sexual abuse media, i was not referring
| to a depiction of but rather a picture of an actual child
| being abused
|
| this is not up for debate
|
| edit: that you need to get a throwaway to argue you point
| tells me you know this shit is indefensible
| throwaway_4749 wrote:
| Ah, haven't used it in a while and that wasn't a problem
| back then, didn't realize you were being literal and not
| just overreacting to drawings
| throwaway_4749 wrote:
| >edit: that you need to get a throwaway to argue you
| point tells me you know this shit is indefensible
|
| Wrong, I just don't wanna argue the morality of lolicon
| images using my real name.
| anotherhue wrote:
| I found it quite straightfoward on NixOS, the usability aspects
| from the article remain, of course. services = {
| elasticsearch = { enable = true; package =
| pkgs.elasticsearch7; dataDir =
| "/persist/elasticsearch"; }; mastodon = {
| enable = true; configureNginx = true;
| localDomain = domain; smtp.fromAddress = email;
| elasticsearch.host = "localhost"; #extraEnvFiles = [
| "/persist/mastodon/secrets.env" ]; }; nginx = let
| dir = "/persist/nginx"; in { enable = true;
| recommendedProxySettings = true; recommendedTlsSettings
| = true; recommendedOptimisation = true;
| recommendedBrotliSettings = true;
| virtualHosts."${domain}" = { enableACME = false;
| sslCertificate = "${dir}/cfcert.pem";
| sslCertificateKey = "${dir}/cfkey.pem"; kTLS = true;
| extraConfig = '' ssl_verify_client on;
| ssl_client_certificate ${dir}/authenticated_origin_pull_ca.pem;
| ''; }; }; postgresql = {
| settings = { shared_preload_libraries =
| "pg_stat_statements"; "pg_stat_statements.track" =
| "all"; "pg_stat_statements.max" = 10000;
| track_activity_query_size = 2048; }; };
| postgresqlBackup = { enable = true;
| compression = "zstd"; backupAll = true;
| location = "/persist/postgresbackup"; }; };
| Rhapso wrote:
| https://docs.microblog.pub/ is intended to be a single person
| instance/blog but the reality is that I am more interested in
| consuming posts than making them, so I just use the built in rss
| feeds to follow people I like
| https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
| unpopularopp wrote:
| >even though it's inconvenient, it's important to me to have
| control over my social media
|
| The whole post is basically showing pretty much features lacking
| that are otherwise quintessential for social media. Can't see
| posts, can't see replies, can't see trends, can't search etc. I
| mean at this point why even use it? It's like having a Ford
| Mustang in your garage that doesn't have tires and steering wheel
| but hey that V8 engine is sure nice.
| serf wrote:
| I could see the point of using a social media 'service' by
| myself as an internal journaling method for aggregating links
| and media and so on, but I wouldn't because much better methods
| exist for such things.
| eternityforest wrote:
| It seems like people are finally realizing how miserable the
| idea of self hosting anything is.
|
| I almost wish I'd never made a personal site and just done
| GitHub pages, even DokuWiki in the cloud isn't perfect.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > It's like having a Ford Mustang in your garage that doesn't
| have tires and steering wheel but hey that V8 engine is sure
| nice.
|
| "OK, but I made the square tyres myself and that is all that
| matters to me.
|
| I also don't need rear view mirrors either because they are far
| too distracting."
| tptacek wrote:
| You can see posts and you can see replies. You won't by default
| see posts and replies that you didn't subscribe to, or that
| aren't addressed to you.
|
| If your preferred experience of social media is sitewide
| trending stories, or searching for topics, single-person
| Mastodon servers aren't a good fit for you. If, like Julia
| Evans, you have both a large audience and a network of people
| you talk to on the regular, it's probably pretty OK.
|
| If Mastodon succeeds (I'm rooting for it), I expect single-
| person servers, delivered by hosting providers like Masto.host
| (but a generation or two away, like Blogger vs. the first
| generation of blog software) to be the normal way people use
| it.
| the-printer wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense. It's hard enough finding
| communities in real life as it is and the internet is at
| scale where the ease of social networking doesn't exist like
| it did in the past.
|
| At this point I think most people who been online long enough
| have a network that's been sustained across many different
| platforms. Federation is great for these sorts of people when
| it's used in the way that you've described.
|
| Centralization still has its use as a meeting ground. The
| "public square" concept can still apply, but the thing is
| that it's unhealthy to spend _all of your time there_ and
| private /controlled gatherings are people can get a break and
| cultivate more unique bonds. Mastodon is interesting because
| it gives people the option to have both (public square or
| private hall).
| intothemild wrote:
| A lot of these downsides are huge deal breakers to me. But the
| one downside not mentioned and the one I'm curious about is the
| trending posts, hashtags, and news features of mastodon.
|
| I can understand that most of the trending stuff might want to be
| instance isolated, or somewhat curated. But on a one person
| instance last time I looked, news for example was horrible
| because I had to actively approve sources every time. Perhaps
| this has changed. The other thing I noticed was that trending
| posts didn't work.
|
| But hearing that you can't see another instances posts or replies
| properly without doing extra work, sounds like a huge oversight.
| For me decentralized social needs to at least allow me to look at
| all the posts or replies.
| astro1 wrote:
| These shortcomings bug me like hell, too. I tried to overcome
| these by building https://fedi.buzz but the Fediverse community
| is quite split over its usefulness or it being a threat to
| their privacy.
| intothemild wrote:
| This will start a little off topic but I will get back to the
| main point.
|
| I feel like there's a group of users who are very against
| anything that might bring MORE users into their service of
| choice. So for mastodon, it's things like fedibuzz, and
| recently on Lemmy (at least on android) it's the Sync App
| coming out.
|
| The Lemmy situation was a very polished very good former
| reddit app, which is now a Lemmy app, seems to have upset a
| lot of people because its "Not Open Source". Which I can
| understand, but I get the feeling the pushback is basically
| the fear that MORE users will come to Lemmy now that the
| experience is nicer.
|
| The third thing is that the more I use bluesky, and the more
| I see these same kinds of infighting or issues come up in
| Masto/Lemmy .. the more I realise that perhaps BSKY is just
| the better longterm choice for me.
|
| Now back to the main point.
|
| I kind of WANT some way to discover new users, or topics, or
| anything discovery related, and having your own Masto
| instance just seems to nerf those things. I'm happy that
| fedibuzz exists, and I'm happy that there's a kind of
| trending posts/news in Masto. But It needs to be better if it
| wants to survive. The average user will not put the kinds of
| effort in to FIND new people that exist elsewhere.
|
| So users join larger instances, because theres discovery
| features there. But then the Local feed is just not great.
| The other side of this is single user instances, and those
| aren't great either.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> But hearing that you can 't see another instances posts or
| replies properly without doing extra work, sounds like a huge
| oversight._
|
| As she mentions, this might be a weird artifact of some servers
| apparently imposing a blanket block on single-user servers. I
| have an account on a large server and I can see profiles of
| users on other servers without issue.
| reustle wrote:
| Surprised there still isn't a dirt cheap service that lets me run
| a single instance for myself to get a proper custom domain (not
| an alias).
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(page generated 2023-08-12 23:02 UTC)