[HN Gopher] My Fediverse use - I'm hosting everything myself - P...
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My Fediverse use - I'm hosting everything myself - PeerTube,
Mastodon and Lemmy
Author : jeena
Score : 199 points
Date : 2023-12-05 13:46 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tube.jeena.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (tube.jeena.net)
| bravetraveler wrote:
| May it survive The Hug
|
| /s, kinda. Peertube may help
| jeena wrote:
| I'm surprised how well it handles it, the load average never
| went over 3.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| That's pretty solid :)
|
| What does the storage/CPU look like? That amounts to the CPU
| time for three cores, roughly, but it could be spent on
| waiting _(eg: I /O)_
|
| Apologies if this is covered in the post, if so -- tell me to
| kick dirt. I've been posting while I should be working! The
| plan was to check it out later _(promise!)_
| jeena wrote:
| I'm using Hetzner and a CX31 shared VCPU
| https://www.hetzner.com/cloud + 250 GB volume. I want to
| move to object storage some day because it's cheaper.
|
| I started with the cheapest one, the CX11 but it was just
| not able to run all the services the load would go up to
| the hundreds and the server would just block itself. The
| CX31 has 2 CPUs and 8GB ram which seems to work well with
| the load I have for now.
| colesantiago wrote:
| This is awesome.
|
| Why don't more people self host / host everything themselves
| these days in the age of privacy?
|
| How can we make more people self host their data rather than
| giving it to corporations?
|
| A start might be to tell people to use extensions that are
| adblockers and to disable javascript on websites and even use and
| setup pi-holes to take back their data and privacy.
|
| There must be more that can be done here but it is a start!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Why don't more people self host / host everything themselves
| these days in the age of privacy?
|
| Because it's a pain in the ass and people don't care enough to.
| People don't want the fediverse, they want an app. They don't
| want to know about cloud and infra primitives, they want their
| photos in their phone and for them to be safe and shareable.
| They want their iMessages and WhatsApp to JustWork(TM).
|
| > How can we make more people self host their data rather than
| giving it to corporations?
|
| You cannot. Make non profits to manage this infra. Wikipedia,
| Lets Encrypt, etc. Hacker News is a benevolent dictatorship
| funded by a VC fund and run by someone passionate about the
| work. Incorporate a 501c3, spin up a deposit account, and start
| sourcing donations and funding to pay for infra and people.
|
| This is not a doomer comment. Enable the power admins and
| passionate folks to deliver a great experience to normies with
| as little effort as possible. Literally how Wikipedia
| functions: datacenter, paid admins, passionate volunteers
| curating bytes.
|
| (Would be cool if Cloudflare supported one click deploy of
| Fediverse tools into their edge cloud; scale when you need, get
| your data out of R2 and databases on demand so you're not
| locked in; having to pay for infra is inevitable, that is to be
| solved for)
| dsr_ wrote:
| Most people would like the privacy, but not the
| responsibility and concomitant work.
| pstuart wrote:
| 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).
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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 directory. You need to
| kill those accounts and change the config.
|
| - you let your cousin have an account, and now he's in a
| flamewar with half of Australia (which he thinks is
| Austria, and also he believes is ruled by the
| Illuminati). You need to shut that down and talk to other
| admins about getting off of their blocklists...
| robolange wrote:
| Great list. A few more:
|
| - Your ISP is [ISPs are, to your 2nd point] actively
| hostile to running "servers" from your connection, so you
| must either pay a ridiculous premium for that privilege,
| or jump through hoops to evade their intentional
| breakage.
|
| - Your other cousin does something illegal (sells drugs,
| posts revenge porn, threatens a public official) using
| your host and now the police are knocking down your door
| in the middle of the night and dragging you in for
| questioning. Even if you avoid charges, your neighbors
| eye you suspiciously from then on.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| 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.
| elashri wrote:
| > Because it's a pain in the ass. People don't want the
| fediverse, they want an app.
|
| It seems that I enjoy the pain with many other people on
| r/selfhosted. I will call that pleasure I feel, The Pleasure
| of Pain.
|
| I think that was what the web was about since the beginning
| and lasted for a good couple of years before targeted ads and
| "data became the new oil".
|
| Edit: I replied before the GP edited the comment.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I do not fault the r/selfhosted masochists, no kink shaming
| here, but recognize outliers vs the mean. Go talk to
| average folks for 15-60 minutes on the street about what
| social (video, communities, threads/twitter/x/whatever,
| etc) means to them, this will help calibrate perspective.
| This is just product and user research. Find out what
| people want and build it, don't build what you think they
| want. Product market fit is not just for startups.
| self_awareness wrote:
| Generally I'm for self hosting everything that I can, I
| just can't help myself pointing out that currently the most
| popular thread on r/selfhosted is "I'd rather kill myself
| than host SMTP again (self.selfhosted)" :D
| Zak wrote:
| > _on r /selfhosted_
|
| If you're not participating in
| https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted from your selfhosted
| Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc... instance, I question your
| commitment.
| jeena wrote:
| I second this!
| rglullis wrote:
| And even when you give them an app and basically spoonfeed
| them with the alternative, the small group that has come
| before will act like a bunch of elitist NIMBYs who will cry
| about their small "community losing character".
| zlg_codes wrote:
| You write this as if the Eternal September problem doesn't
| exist.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
| hruzgar wrote:
| maybe not exactely what you're looking for (not open source
| and not non profit) but there is some solutions out there
| like this one: https://elest.io/
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| More like https://discourse.org/. You can run it yourself,
| but you can also just have them ding a credit card every
| month and not think about it again. Wordpress has
| Automattic, and I'd like to see the same for Peertube and
| Mastodon. With Mastodon, one can then go to folks and say,
| "Heh, here is a turnkey solution to migrate to for your
| 1:many and social interaction needs, fully managed." As
| long as these applications support an S3 compatible target
| for backups and restores, portability is a database and
| object backfill and DNS switch away. If you want strong
| durable storage, the Internet Archive has Vault, a product
| that can act as long term storage of last resort for
| digital preservation.
|
| Lets Encrypt serves nearly 192M websites with 13 full time
| staff and an annual budget of approximately $3.35M, for
| example.
| masto wrote:
| I am using https://masto.host/ for Mastodon and
| https://elest.io/ for Lemmy. They are fully managed.
|
| I'm not worried about who owns my data, but I do want to
| have a stable identity. The first Mastodon server I
| signed up with mysteriously disappeared after a couple of
| weeks, so I decided I was better off paying a small
| monthly fee to put it on my own domain.
| malikNF wrote:
| Convenience. Setting it up, maintaining it, cost, audience
| reach. Lots of reasons.
| ISL wrote:
| I would self-host on a cloud instance for a monthly fee if it
| required no maintenance overhead from me.
|
| I might also self-host if residential ISPs didn't treat home
| servers as an aberration.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Because self hosting is a big commitment, costly in time and
| resources, and just generally a skill that the vast majority of
| users simply don't have (and they'd be well advised not to
| bother). There are a few managed mastodon services for this
| that I've been eyeing for corporate usage as I can see the
| moment coming that we'd might to be on mastodon at least as
| Twitter/X has been imploding a bit lately. I could probably
| figure out self hosting but I have more urgent things to do.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Compared to the good old days of LAMP, self hosting services
| like Mastodon is fairly costly (in RAM, DB space, etc).
| catapart wrote:
| >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, enters
| in any global details for accounts they want to maintain, and
| manages all the configuration options for the server.
|
| The server would host all of the things a household would want
| to maintain, using open source projects for transparency and
| maintainability. That would include things like peertube and
| mastadon for publishing content and media, but it would also
| include home automation software, as well as personal media
| software like owncloud as a way to replace google drive content
| and plex to manage personal media playback.
|
| Basically, a little server that uses open-source software to
| emulate every modern cloud-based service, on a household scale
| so that you can run it cheaply enough to be affordable ($60-$70
| bucks?), layered in encryption and firewalls for privacy and
| federated to other home servers (and everywhere else) using the
| fediverse, while also adding in anything you would want a home-
| management or home media server to do.
|
| I call it an "accent server". Like an "accent table". I would
| make it stylish enough to display, but discreet enough to tuck
| out of sight.
|
| And, personally, I see this kind of thing coming around either
| way. It's just a matter of whether or not one company puts
| together all of this software and starts offering it as a
| walled garden, or if it bumbles itself together out of CLI
| utility chaining, and enough reddit posts circling around the
| same setup questions.
|
| That assumption is based on the idea that most people seem to
| want what this would provide; it's just that not even
| particularly tech-minded people want to go through the steps of
| setting each of all of these things up. And it's only when you
| have 3 or 4 of the services or features working in tandem that
| they add up enough to make a change in lifestyle (which is what
| we're attempting) tempting enough.
|
| So if you could put together a "buy it once, plug it in, set it
| up, forget about it" kind of offering, I think you would get a
| ton of people that would buy it, and then once it was just a
| thing in your house that you could start adding custom plugins
| to (as easy as installing an app), then you would get a ton of
| adoption. The hard part is marketing; you have to really
| explain it fully to make anyone understand what it is you're
| trying to offer.
| robolange wrote:
| 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 come
| close to a market of normies.
|
| - The raw idea seems easy.
|
| - The initial implementation seems like it should be of
| moderate difficulty, but is actually very challenging to get
| even close to right.
|
| - The long term maintenance is a nightmare, but don't worry,
| you won't survive long enough to worry about that.
|
| - The infrastructure and policy implications of getting and
| keeping it connected to everyone else are intractable. (See
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531969 for some tip-
| of-the-iceberg examples.)
|
| And yeah, none of that even touches on marketing.
| catapart wrote:
| 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!
| Feathercrown wrote:
| This actually seems like a great use-case for FOSS. Lots
| of people have tried their hand at this, so why don't we
| all put a little effort in to get it done?
| mal-2 wrote:
| I think fediverse offers a decent compromise here which is that
| people can self-host an instance for other people to use. Some
| of the longest running instances have a few hundred users or
| maybe a thousand. So if one in 300 people is interested in
| self-hosting then they can support the other people who either
| don't have the skills or don't have the interest. It's not
| perfect but it's working pretty well for those servers.
| self_awareness wrote:
| I'm interested in stories that span for several years, because if
| someone installs and maintains something for 1-2 months, then
| this is not really an indicator of anything. Part of the
| difficulty comes with system updates, application updates,
| migration of configuration files, hostile environment like DDoSes
| of angry people, hacking attempts, deprecated docker containers,
| incompatible library versions, changed policy of python scripts
| on some Linux distro, than span over multiple year periods. I
| would be interested in hearing what people have to say, but
| including the later subjects as well.
|
| I like your music by the way (Hoggatah)!
| jeena wrote:
| Ah, haha thanks for the Hoggatah shutout :D
|
| Yeah my self hosting story started in 2003 and involves moving
| all of those things to many different servers, etc. I had
| problems with hacking when I used WordPress, the server has
| been taken over 2 times. Once I stopped that those problems
| stopped too. And because I have only 1 person instances I don't
| get much attention of angry people.
|
| The depricated PHP version is my biggest problem until now, I
| used a lib written in PHP 4 which are now incompatible with PHP
| 8 and I can't easily rewrite it to make it compatible. So this
| one is still running on PHP 7, but I will need to do something
| about it in the future. The best would be to export everything
| into static HTML but that's also not quite straight forward.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Peertube is supposed to be peer to peer but even though there's 8
| seeders right now I can't even watch the video...
| rglullis wrote:
| AFAIK, Peertube is only p2p when the normal streaming server is
| overloaded.
| ekianjo wrote:
| looks like it's overloaded all right
| cchance wrote:
| i mean he got HN hugged
| liotier wrote:
| I watched it smoothly and the peer count was 3.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm always curious to see if peertube is going to work but I
| have to admit it started immediately, said it had 9 seeders,
| and worked fine.
|
| But I wonder how it works after a few weeks when it's not being
| HN'd and the author isn't seeding it.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Obviously then it won't. It's like asking how is a YouTube
| video going to work if YouTube the entity stops hosting it.
|
| Honestly, the peer tube method of storing media is actually
| kinda nice. Not everything needs to live forever, and it
| brings back a semblance of privacy.
|
| On the other hand of this, larger companies can pin smaller
| videos on other instances while supplementing with their own
| ad supported videos.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Can you host seedboxes for peertube videos? Like using
| regular torrent clients, or does peertube have their own
| agent software for this?
| jeena wrote:
| You can follow other servers and help to spread the load.
| You can decide how much of your space you want to use for
| that and which strategy you want to use to cache other
| peoples servers (new videos, most watched, hot, etc.)
| depingus wrote:
| I have a question that I was hoping the video would answer, but I
| didn't see. The Fediverse is always described with that
| interconnected diagram where everything talks to each other over
| ActivityPub. But I never see that in practice.
|
| For example: If I have a mastodon.social account, how does that
| work with pixelfed.social or tube.jenna.net? Do I use my
| mastodon.social account to sign up to those other services? Or to
| follow users on those other services? How do the clients handle
| the fact that they are different services?
| BigTuna wrote:
| If pixelfed and mastodon are federated with each other, you
| should be able to view users and posts from both sites on
| either site - no need to sign up for both.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| You just follow those users at their @user@pixelfed.social or
| @user@tube.jenna.net handle. Depending on the service you are
| using there can be caveats (I think pixelfed only tracks new
| content from mastodon after you follow the user) but otherwise
| it "just works".
|
| caveat: This only works as long as your instance hasn't de-
| federated those instances.
| gpm wrote:
| You use your mastodon account to tell your mastodon instance to
| follow a user on the pixelfed.social instance. Your mastodon
| instance starts getting a feed of all the posts by that user
| from the pixelfed.social instance and displaying them to you in
| your mastodon timeline as if they were mastodon posts.
|
| This works because while pixelfed and mastodon and
| tube.jenna.net display things differently, the things they are
| displaying are in fact very very similar. Posts by users,
| consisting of maybe a video, maybe an image, maybe a reference
| to a post they're replying to, and some text. Ultimately it
| will be up to the individual implementation what to do with
| posts that are different enough that they can't figure out a
| reasonable way to display them.
| nightpool wrote:
| > 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 take a quick look at the list of reblogs on that post
| to see how many different servers users use:
| https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k/111528162462505087/reblog...
| I count 17 different servers in the first 20 users listed. Many
| of these are deployments of Mastodon or Akkoma, but they're all
| completely separate servers talking to each other over
| ActivityPub
|
| > For example: If I have a mastodon.social account, how does
| that work with pixelfed.social or tube.jenna.net?
|
| You can use your account and client on mastodon.social to
| follow accounts on tube.jenna.net and pixelfed.social. These
| accounts are displayed inside of the mastodon.social UI. You
| don't "sign up" for those instances in any way, they're just an
| integrated part of your following feed.
|
| > How do the clients handle the fact that they are different
| services?
|
| There is no special logic needed from clients. For Mastodon
| specifically, the local server that you're following from will
| handle the logic of translating the ActivityPub JSON sent by
| other services into the more limited "Mastodon API" format that
| clients expect. This has pros and cons--it means that clients
| are able to handle a more limited and predictable set of posts,
| but it also means that some remote content gets "squished" down
| into that format, just like e.g. viewing a blog inside of an
| RSS reader. Other clients generally use their own similar
| domain-specific API format
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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 WriteFreely that
| isn't a Twitter clone
| nightpool wrote:
| 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
| dingnuts wrote:
| >All mainstream servers ... do this kind of "squishing",
| which is a sad reality of client design and not what the
| ActivityPub spec was intended for
|
| I understand what you mean by "the Mastodon API" but I
| think we're talking past each other; this does not seem
| like a client design problem but a protocol problem.
|
| I would like to contend that the ActivityPub spec is too
| vague and thus clients are forced to do this "squishing"
| in order to find a portion of the spec that is
| sufficiently well-defined as to actually be practical for
| a specific use-case like a federating Twitter clone.
|
| As far as I can tell, there's an echo of this lack of
| definition in the ActivityPub (and actually more
| specifically, in the ActivityStreams) specification if
| you do a tour of the ecosystem of implementations, you'll
| find that almost all of them are in dynamically typed
| high-level languages like Ruby (Mastodon).
| Implementations in languages like Go where JSON
| deserialization must be defined per-type have a very hard
| time with ActivityStreams and you'll find that Go
| implementations of ActivityPub like go-fed are much more
| narrowly scoped in their functionality in order to avoid
| this problem.
|
| I have wasted many, many hours on ActivityPub, and I am
| extremely sad to make this comment, because I understand
| why it was invented.. but I'm not sure it's really good
| enough to achieve its goals.
| rsolva wrote:
| You can't (yet?) log in at other websites, but you can follow
| anyone from any fediverse service. I follow accounts from
| PixelFed and PeerTube on my own self-hosted version, which
| feels very web native and self evident when you get used to it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's federated like email. If you have a Gmail account, you can
| talk to people with a Yahoo account. You can't use your Gmail
| account to log into another server, though, unless that server
| adds code to specifically support it. They're separate servers
| operated by separate entities.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| There are some initiatives that are doing more what you are
| looking for, vocata and activitypod. These treat activitypub
| more like a modern email server, that recieves and sends
| activities to different federated servers.
|
| In a world where those would be used, "apps" would just
| subscribe to the activities that interest them, and you would
| be one user that adds apps to your system. You'd be able to
| have something closer to google suite, where your calendar app
| can display notes from your note app, or your notes app could
| display shared notes, comments etc.
|
| Today though, most of the big activitypub players decided to
| implement their own activitypub server and don't really follow
| the protocol to the letter, so unfortunately it's not as
| interoperable as it could be. You also need to have an account
| for each service, which is unfortunate.
| esbranson wrote:
| 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 implementations
| correctly enable CORS. CORS is just an example of the treatment
| that ActivityPub gets.
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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.
| esbranson wrote:
| 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.
| spadufed wrote:
| I haven't seen anybody else talk about what the experience of
| following somebody from another service is like on the user-
| end.
|
| Following pixelfed accounts from Mastodon is actually fairly
| straightforward. You simply see them as a tweetlike message
| with an image attached. One caveat there is that Mastodon does
| not allow for as many attached images as pixelfed, and I
| believe will simply drop any images after a certain point (I
| want to say max size is 4).
|
| Following a peertube account or channel (you can do either)
| will show a post whenever new videos are uploaded. You can find
| the OP on mastodon at
| https://mastodon.social/@jeena@tube.jeena.net. One neat bit of
| functionality is that if you put all of your peertube follows
| into a single list, you've basically got a chronological
| subscribed page (a la youtube). Also take note that comments
| can be left on either the peertube site or from within
| mastodon.
| paulnpace wrote:
| Video played perfectly for me, though I did leave it at 1x
| because I didn't want to miss anything with his accent.
|
| My only mild disappointment is he seems to feel that Mastodon is
| free of censorship. I've never installed or reviewed configuring
| Mastodon because my understanding is the someone, somewhere, can
| somehow interfere with what a user sees in a feed.
|
| Anyone familiar with this? Is it just default install
| configuration that leads to this behavior?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Censorship policies are dependent on the specific instance
| where you signed up and they are almost always very clearly
| spelled out. The main instance for example clearly spells out
| five rules including four forbidden categories here:
| https://mastodon.social/auth/sign_up Contravening these rules
| can absolutely get you deplatformed.
|
| I've also seen the signup page of other instances having dozens
| of categories of prohibited posts.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| If you host your own instance, you have full control. If you
| don't host your own instance, then whoever hosts it for you has
| control (as they are the admin for your instance).
|
| This means you tradeoff someone administrating the server and
| moderating content (shared instances often have a TOS) for full
| freedom. i.e. If you self host you have full, manual control
| for better or worse.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| > 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| 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 did not follow and that I did not want on my machine, nor
| did I want to wade through and delete things.
|
| I uninstalled.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| jdofaz wrote:
| One issue I've run into with unexpected NSFW in my
| federated TL on a single user instance is when people I
| follow reply to an unfollowed account's NSFW post, when
| the reply gets sent to my server it fetches the parent
| post
| rsolva wrote:
| Nothing is censorship-free, but the social web (the fediverse)
| is just a bunch of websites. A website can be blocked at the
| DNS level, but that is exceedingly rare. Other websites may
| choose to block your site for their community. That is the way
| of the web.
|
| Each site has different rules and cultures. It's convenient to
| sign up at someone elses site, but you give up some control.
| Want to live by your own rules? Put up your own website and
| participate in the social web that way!
|
| I run my own GoToSocial website, which is a Go project that is
| much simpler to install and maintain than Mastodon. Hit the
| sweetspot for me, at least.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| > A website can be blocked at the DNS level, but that is
| exceedingly rare.
|
| This is done more then you think. Probably the most known one
| is thepiratebay for example
| timtom39 wrote:
| and archive.ph on cloudflare (nothing but CAPTCHAs)
| detaro wrote:
| that's archive.ph's doing because they don't like
| cloudflare (there is a DNS extension where a DNS resolver
| forwards the prefix of the users IP to the DNS server of
| the site. Cloudflare does not use that, and
| archive.ph/.is says that they break their ability to
| properly host their site by doing that)
| rsolva wrote:
| It happens, but with limited effect and restricted to
| certain jurisdictions. My point is that the social web is
| not owned or controlled by any one commercial entity,
| just like the rest of the web.
|
| The pirate bay is blocked by law in Norway by the ISPs
| DNS servers, but is trivial to get around. It is a very
| soft kind of censorship, which is the beauty of the
| Internet.
| El_RIDO wrote:
| It's the same censorship-model as with mail servers: You can
| use a big shared hoster and the rules of that hosts country and
| their policies apply. You can run your own and you will have to
| deal with any local legal requirements and get to set (but also
| have to enforce) your own policies. In reality,
| (self-)censorship is the smallest of your problems, spam and
| abuse of your service is what you'll be mostly dealing with.
|
| For a small instance with only a handful of friend and family
| accounts that effort (spam, abuse, legal stuff) will take less
| than 1h per month. On a large instance that can become a full
| persons job.
|
| Source: I'm running my own fediverse instance since 2011 (using
| Friendica, predates Mastodon) - as well as my own mail server.
| renegat0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| I see people repeatedly misunderstand this aspect
| unfortunately, because it's hurting the adoption. It has no
| effect what instance you are on, you are all on Activity Pub.
| You can join any instance you want and it will be no different
| from joining any other instance. You can interact with anyone
| on any instance. This is just like how you only need to know my
| Email address to send me a message, you do not need to also use
| the same Email provider as me.
| neogodless wrote:
| > it will be no different from joining any other instance
|
| This is not 100% accurate. Who the collective members of a
| server follow affects the content shown in searches and feeds
| to some degree.
|
| For example, compare https://hachyderm.io/tags/cybertruck to
| https://mastodon.social/tags/cybertruck
|
| As you can see, the bigger server 50% more posts, 40% more
| participants, 25% more posts today.
|
| As you surf your "local server", you don't get "everything"
| from the Fediverse. If you care about that, you likely want
| to join the "biggest" server you can.
|
| Personally I don't care too much about this. There's more
| content added to the Fediverse than I have time to consume,
| and so seeing a slice based on who I currently follow and the
| server I utilize is plenty for me.
|
| But it also makes sense if it bothers people who don't want
| to miss out on some zeitgeist.
| iteratethis wrote:
| There are incredibly important differences in user experience
| when picking one instance over the other.
|
| A very small one has a large likelihood to disappear. Each
| instance has different moderation rules. On a small instance,
| you don't even see entire threads and lots of other stuff
| does not sync properly.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The servers are connected. That's the federation.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| it is probably not unless you are on some very extreme
| instances.
| pimterry wrote:
| In general, yes, a user on any mastodon instance can access any
| other - they are not siloed.
|
| Even further: a user on a mastodon instance can see & interact
| with posts on Lemmy (the Reddit alternative), pics on Pixelfed
| (=Instagram), videos on Peertube (=Youtube), and content from a
| long list of other services, all from their single mastodon
| instance.
|
| (There are exceptions, e.g. you could run a siloed internal
| company mastodon, and notably server administrators are able to
| block other servers entirely - but as a user you can always
| choose a server that federates as widely as you'd like, and if
| you self-host you're unlikely to block or be blocked by
| anybody)
| sschueller wrote:
| If your instance on which the user is on or the other one
| blocks that instance you will not have access.
|
| The user identity is an issue on the fediverse and it is know
| by the creators of ActivityPub. There are plans to create a way
| for global identities which will solve many of these issues.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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).
| wccrawford wrote:
| 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.
| jeena wrote:
| Yeah with Lemmy it's pretty extreme. But to be fair, Lemmy is
| the only fediverse software I run in docker, Mastodon and
| PeerTube work easy enough without. But Lemmy being written in a
| compiled language makes it more difficult to get everything
| installed and set up to compile it. Once it's done it's very
| lightweight in comparison to especially Mastodon, which is
| nice.
| martincmartin wrote:
| 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.
| dgellow wrote:
| 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.
| mappu wrote:
| It is common to use --privileged (or -v docker.sock) and
| run docker commands inside docker. But then you're not
| really _in_ the container, you may as well be on the host.
|
| I think genuinely containerizing inside an ordinary
| container, without --privileged, would mean taking extreme
| compromises like bocker or proot.
|
| What's the state of the art here?
| dgellow wrote:
| I cannot fix my comment anymore, but I meant to write DinD.
|
| See https://hub.docker.com/_/docker
| apitman wrote:
| The Nextcloud All in One (AOI) images takes another approach,
| which is use the first image to launch the other needed
| images. So it lets you avoid docker compose at the cost of
| needing to pass the docker socket to the AOI container.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| I never thought of using "number of docker instances" as a
| metric for evaluating software before now.
| spadufed wrote:
| That's because it's a pretty silly way to look at things in a
| world of docker compose.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Classic. Tools become too abstracted? Add a layer of
| abstraction to manage them.
|
| Feel like there must be an xkcd comic on this, but it
| doesn't leap to mind yet.
| europeanNyan wrote:
| This one comes to mind immediately: https://xkcd.com/927/
| spadufed wrote:
| I mean, asking them to plop their cli docker setup into a
| yaml file isn't exactly a difficult task. I think it's
| probably more correct to consider docker-compose an
| integral part of docker rather than a superfluous
| abstraction layer.
| superfrank wrote:
| That would also discourage me from setting it up, so I don't
| blame you, but just asking, was there not a docker compose
| somewhere for setting this up. It seems like that would make
| things a lot easier.
| smcleod wrote:
| Video loaded perfectly and quicker than YouTube!
| throwaway290 wrote:
| It says my browser is not compatible. What is this web... Do I
| need to switch to chrome if I want to read someone's post about
| fediverse now?
| jeena wrote:
| What browser do you use? I'm on Firefox 120.
| WolfeReader wrote:
| You should upgrade your browser, since IE6 is no longer
| supported.
|
| (If you don't want us to assume what your browser is, you
| should say what your browser is.)
| tiberius_p wrote:
| Is there a way to have like a backup cloud solution in case my
| electricity goes down at home and my self hosted server shuts
| down? Some cloud service that does nothing most of the time
| except backing up data from the self hosted server from time to
| time and monitoring if it's up and connected to the internet, and
| if it's not then it takes over and offers the same service.
| jeena wrote:
| 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.
| ggpsv wrote:
| 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.
| jeena wrote:
| I don't think a static Mastodon or Lemmy is very useful.
| For PeerTube that might be something to consider.
| ggpsv wrote:
| Sure, it won't offer exactly the same affordance but the
| OP mentioned rare downtimes like electricity going out
| (rare here is used generously, obviously some places see
| this happen often).
|
| Providing a read-only, static version of the services,
| particularly toots and blog posts, while the origin is
| unreachable is straightforward and inexpensive.
|
| Somewhat related, the Solar Protocol [0] does something
| like this to host websites across an array of solar-
| powered servers across the globe.
| http://solarprotocol.net/
| teddyh wrote:
| With the new HTTPS DNS records you could point to the
| backup server with a lower priority; no need to update the
| DNS!
| ragebol wrote:
| How often does your power cut out unexpectedly and how bad is
| that for you and your website?
|
| For me in the Netherlands, maybe 2 years ago my power cut out
| for an hour IIRC. Pretty reliable, good enough for my website
| to be just as available.
|
| Point being: is it worth the effort to have a backup in that
| circumstance?
| kome wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| ertian wrote:
| This is true, but it does reinforce and cement in- and out-
| group dynamics. You're more likely to be exposed to
| unfamiliar ideas on a place like Reddit, specifically because
| you don't _have_ to pick an explicit bubble. When picking a
| Lemmy instance, you kinda end up aligning yourself with some
| worldview, and letting some set of strangers curate your
| environment for you.
|
| Incidentally, that's sort of the weirdest part of signing up
| for Lemmy. I can't be the only one who got to the "Pick an
| instance!" step and got kinda paralyzed. I'm a programmer,
| should I sign up to a programmer-centric instance? But I also
| have hobbies, political views, favorite forms & genres of
| media... Should those take priority? And by picking one of
| them, what curation or censorship am I going to be subject
| to?
|
| I appreciate the fact that Lemmy isn't under the thumb of one
| monolith, and that I can bounce from once instance to another
| if the first isn't working out. But I also like the 'big-
| tent' feeling of Reddit, where I can sub to all kinds of
| subreddits, even if the two groups don't get along at all.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I see what you're saying. OTOH, you can belong to several
| Lemmy instances at once. In that sense, it's kind of like
| phpBB. Which forum do I want to join? The set that covers
| my interests today! Maybe you like to argue about Star Trek
| vs Star Wars on a Sci-Fi Lemmy/phpBB, and learn to make
| souffles the French Cuisine board of a Cooking Lemmy/phpBB.
| You don't have to join the Cooking instance and then limit
| yourself to looking for fellow chefs who also like Firefly.
| iteratethis wrote:
| I don't think that paints a complete picture.
|
| There's a shared covenant and there's shared block lists,
| both of which heavily influence what the norm is on the
| larger Mastodon network. Perhaps an even larger dynamic are
| activist-type admins that have an extremely low tolerance for
| content countering their political beliefs and will blackmail
| other admins into enforcing a block of a user or entire
| instance.
|
| None of this is a shocking revelation as a large portion of
| older Mastodon users are known for their excessive safety-
| ism. It's a perpetual conflict on the network versus those
| that want to be more forgiving and pragmatic.
|
| Anyway, the bottom line is that mainstream Mastodon is a left
| to far-left network, and content is moderated as such. The
| idea "just pick another server" doesn't really apply.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I vehemently disagree. In practice, I don't use those
| blocklists and neither do the neighbor instances we most
| heavily interact with. I'll occasionally hear from a friend
| that "new instance XYZ is sharing loli porn" or "instance
| ABC's moderators quit and now it's flooded with swastikas",
| and then I (and my neighbors) will verify whether that's
| true, and then disconnect those specific instances.
|
| I also think mainstream Mastodon is only left to far-left
| in the median, because far-right instances tend to be more
| of a pain in the ass to be around than far-left ones, and
| thus get themselves banned more often. If there were far-
| left instances running around posting memes "joking" that
| we should kill minorities, I'm confident they'd also get
| disconnected quickly.
|
| Put another way, I don't recall ever disconnecting with an
| instance because of its users' opinions, unless those
| opinions were utterly vile to the point that I'm completely
| unwilling to hear "their side of the argument". Most blocks
| are due to bad behavior, not unsavory thought.
| iteratethis wrote:
| I didn't mean to suggest that you're somehow unreasonable
| in how you run your server, I was mostly commenting on
| the larger concept of mainstream Mastodon.
|
| Indeed, right to far-right doesn't stand a chance there
| so they get blocked. They effectively move to a darkweb
| situation where you never see their content unless you're
| really trying hard to look for it.
|
| What remains, mainstream Mastodon, is moderated to the
| left, if not far-left. Or perhaps it's a very vocal far-
| left minority silencing the rest. It's of course not
| universal across the entire network, but roughly the vibe
| of the network.
| Feathercrown wrote:
| > the best solution is to use your own website for everything
|
| You can host your own fediverse services and won't have to
| worry about being censored
| iteratethis wrote:
| Mainstream Mastodon is basically hard-left Gen Z. Misfits and
| doomers, including the many joyless Twitter refugees.
|
| To each their own, but I learned that I rather have a little
| "too much" speech instead of this.
| apitman wrote:
| One huge shortcoming of the Fediverse as currently implemented is
| that you have to use a different ID for each app, ie
| tube.jeena.net/@jeena, toot.jeena.net/@jeena, etc. What if you
| want to use the Mastodon UI to write a comment on a video? Your
| comment is going to use a different ID than the one you normally
| use to interact with videos. Given this, what's the point of
| federating these different apps with each other?
|
| We need to figure out a way to share a single id across apps.
| Could be as simple as having a single URL as your user ID
| profile, and listing multiple public keys which are used by your
| various apps. The keys can be rotated as necessary since your URL
| is still the final authority on control over your identity.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| A blockchain might actually be a decent solution for this. Just
| make it so the tokens don't have value.
| apitman wrote:
| If all your target users are comfortable with the tradeoffs
| of systems built on blockchains (ie private key is the source
| of authority), you're probably looking for Nostr.
| lovvtide wrote:
| Nostr is not built on a blockchain
| apitman wrote:
| Yeah sorry for those not familiar it probably sounds like
| I was saying that. I just meant to point out it has some
| of the same UX tradeoffs.
| irusensei wrote:
| For context the only things nostr have in common with
| Bitcoin is using secp256k1 for identity. It has been cooked
| mainly by bitcoiners but AFAIK part of the driving force
| was specifically to avoid the "everything is a blockchain
| with a native token" situation.
|
| Naturally you will find lots of bitcoin people using and
| developing clients (hence the Lightning integration on most
| clients) but apparently it has been picking the interest of
| other groups. There seems to be a thriving Japanese
| community.
| kuchenbecker wrote:
| I don't know enough about the Fediverse, but are those
| pluggable? I could see having a trusted third party for
| Identity management.
| apitman wrote:
| Why have a third party rather than choosing one of your apps
| to be the "primary"?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| In practice, federation works _great_ when the apps all have
| the same basic structure, and gets pretty rough otherwise.
|
| Mastodon instances basically _work great_ with each other, and
| with Friendica and Calckey too, since they have the same
| Twitter-like structure. Lemmy and Kbin - and all instances
| thereof - can chat with each other without issue too, since
| they have the communities + threads structure in common.
|
| But trying to get Mastodon and Lemmy to talk to each other is
| 1. surprisingly possible, and 2. kind of annoying, since they
| speak the same protocol but have different structures of
| communication. And never mind other ActivityPub applications
| like BookWyrm or WriteFreely or PeerTube.
| apitman wrote:
| Do they really need to work that differently though? It seems
| to me that almost all of them can be represented as trees of
| text entries. Blog+comments, HN/reddit threads, Stackoverflow
| QAs, DMs, Discord/Slack, forums. These are all just text
| trees with optional attachments and/or links to other content
| (images and videos etc). Why not build that tree structure
| into the protocol (all you need is 1 parent and 0+ children
| for each entry)?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| (Using Lemmy+Mastodon as an example)
|
| Lemmy has the concept of "communities" - subreddits,
| basically. On Mastodon, you can follow a Lemmy user and see
| their posts+comments exactly as you'd expect. And you can
| follow a community too! To Mastodon's point of view, the
| community is a single user that "boosts" (re-tweets) every
| post and every comment made within. So following a
| moderately active community from Mastodon will absolutely
| flood your feed with 100% of the community's user activity.
|
| Meanwhile, Lemmy doesn't do direct messages or use hashtags
| as a first-class feature. So if a Mastodon user tries to DM
| a Lemmy user, or a Lemmy user wants to follow a hashtag,
| they're out of luck.
|
| And again, there are other Fediverse apps with even
| different models than these. Gitea, Forgejo, and GitLab are
| going to adapt ActivityPub to all federate with each other
| - this is a huge win, of course - but would we expect
| someone to make or review a pull request from their
| BookWyrm account?
| spadufed wrote:
| They absolutely do not. This is more of a state of the
| ecosystem sort of problem. I think a lot of developers were
| wary of getting into how some of the more esoteric AP
| objects should work. It's important to note too that while
| we have a standard in the form of AP a lot of the decisions
| about norms for these less common message types simply have
| not been made, but we are definitely moving in that
| direction as more services add AP integration.
| spadufed wrote:
| To expand on this a little the two services make use of
| different well-defined objects in the AP standard. Lemmy
| communities are Groups in AP and top level posts are
| implemented as Pages (rather than Notes). As it stands
| Mastodon only has basic support for these two but a rework of
| Groups is listed on the roadmap as in-progress
| (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap).
| dartos wrote:
| There just needs to be "social protocols" on top of activitypub.
|
| Basically a set of message types that every implementor has a way
| of displaying
| spadufed wrote:
| I think what you're describing IS activitypub. The major issue
| is that each implementor has a preferred message type and only
| basic functionality of the others. I've posted this elsewhere
| in the thread, but Lemmy top-level posts are implemented as
| Pages and communities are implemented as Groups. Currently
| Mastodon has implemented both but with limited functionality.
| There is a rework of Groups that is listed as in-progress on
| the roadmap (https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap).
|
| I think the way we ended up in this situation is that there are
| quite a few types of messages in the AP protocol, and up until
| recently the up and coming ones were seeing pretty limited use.
| Without another service to test against, I can understand why a
| lot of fediverse developers have opted to kick that can down
| the road. That said, we are definitely in the era of
| determining the defacto use case for each of these message
| abstractions, and I suspect that will be a slow process and
| involve a lot of back and forth between projects.
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