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I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install th

I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC) or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair) after trouble getting it working behind the same reverse proxy everything else is behind. If we could get a cross-platform, statically linked, near zero configuration social media tool where I essentially just have to forward a few ports, that'd be fantastic for me and I'd hope many others. The biggest draw of something decentralization is being able to own and control all my data and having some stranger on the Internet rather than BigCorp own it is not meaningfully different to me.

gobengo 9y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you that there is so much room for improvement in ease of use. But tools help. It took like an hour to tweak an existing helm chart to get it running in my personal kubernetes cluster. All the reverse proxy stuff is handled by the nginx-ingress-controller I use. external-dns set up all the DNS rules for me in Route53. kube-lego did all the LetsEncrypt ACME shenanigans. Used to try to run these all using docker on a single VM, and do some manual nginx configging to route to them. This is much easier. Took awhile to learn, but get to benefit from those efficiencies for years. https://mastodon.bengo.is/ https://mastodon.bengo.is/
thsealienbstrds 9y ago
I just want to say that I found Matrix's synapse server pretty easy to setup.
egypturnash 9y ago
I won't disagree with the fact that it's a pain to get one up - but I've never touched Docker before, and I was able to get my instance up and running in a Docker container on a DigitalOcean droplet in a few hours over a couple days. Sorting out the account creation email took about a week longer, IIRC. I don't feel like digging through the earliest toots I made on my instance to be sure of that right now. I'm curious: would having your data be controlled by someone only one or two steps of friendship away feel different from a total stranger, or a corporation?

gobengo 9y ago

I'm not disagreeing with you that there is so much room for improvement in ease of use. But tools help. It took like an hour to tweak an existing helm chart to get it running in my personal kubernetes cluster. All the reverse proxy stuff is handled by the nginx-ingress-controller I use. external-dns set up all the DNS rules for me in Route53. kube-lego did all the LetsEncrypt ACME shenanigans. Used to try to run these all using docker on a single VM, and do some manual nginx configging to route to them. This is much easier. Took awhile to learn, but get to benefit from those efficiencies for years. https://mastodon.bengo.is/ https://mastodon.bengo.is/

thsealienbstrds 9y ago

I just want to say that I found Matrix's synapse server pretty easy to setup.

egypturnash 9y ago

I won't disagree with the fact that it's a pain to get one up - but I've never touched Docker before, and I was able to get my instance up and running in a Docker container on a DigitalOcean droplet in a few hours over a couple days. Sorting out the account creation email took about a week longer, IIRC. I don't feel like digging through the earliest toots I made on my instance to be sure of that right now. I'm curious: would having your data be controlled by someone only one or two steps of friendship away feel different from a total stranger, or a corporation?