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excellent write up for the whys.. If you all would like to move it offshore and keep it alive, I've been looking into ways to decentralize similar projects. W

excellent write up for the whys.. If you all would like to move it offshore and keep it alive, I've been looking into ways to decentralize similar projects. Would like to know what kind of servers are needed for the 400k mastodon accounts. Are we talking a couple of quad core processors and a few TB or hard drive space? Curious what size the DB is too.

Kye 5y ago
It's not just the servers. You also need a CDN that won't shut you down, a host that won't shut you down, and so on. That was a problem for them early on since they started with Cloudflare. Even if you're within their policies, this is a prime target for DDoSes.
- stevenicr 5y ago
  I've been researching these things a bit here and there. Certainly having hosting and domain names and the infrastructure that does not have a history of shutting people down would be a good start. So yeah godaddy and cloudflare would be out from the start. ddos sucks - been there deal with that a time or two. but yeah, if servers could be replicated in many places, and plans for multiple ways to move to a new domain name, or dns, or ip or whatever and such are already laid, and this info is already given to the users so they can move to new X when Y happens.. I really want to deploy a keybase-like blockchain kind of thing that is auto replicated - and if someone has an individual account blocked in country A then friends of that person would know that another account is already active via service/infrastructure B. I dunno, it seems there are many pieces already out there that could make these things happen - and it's not going to be easy to get it setup at first, and some of the pieces would be blocked in various regions - but give the end users the tools to jump to E F or G... it can be done. The internet is already going in this bifurcated (trifurcated / qua..) direction anyhow and I see no way to stop it, might as well replicate for it.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    Do CloudFlare have a history of shutting things down? From what i recall there were two incidents which were extremely egregious (Daily Stormer and a chan) and CloudFlare only acted after months of outside pressure.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > Do CloudFlare have a history of shutting things down? They will readily shut down anything that might expose them to legal liability (i.e. CSAM, credit card fraud). Daily Stormer and the various xChan projects are vile, but mostly legal under US law, in contrast.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        > They will readily shut down anything that might expose them to legal liability Well.. yeah, and so will anyone.
        baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        Stop normalizing censorship. No, "anyone" will not immediately shut down anything that exposes a legal liability.
        mschuster91 5y ago
        > Stop normalizing censorship. We're talking about pedophiles and fraud here. Stuff that is illegal everywhere in the civilized world. As for the Daily Stormer and the xChan projects: the stuff hosted there also violates laws, holocaust denial or many forms of antisemitism are a crime in most of the European Union. And the only people calling that "censorship"... well, they tend to be Nazis or have no problem supporting Nazis.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        Remember the time when the ACLU fought for the right of American Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois? The leader of the ACLU at that time was a Jewish guy. He didn't like the American Nazis, but he recognized that the bureaucratic machinery used to prevent them from assembling was almost entirely identical to the bureaucratic machinery used against the civil rights movement in the South.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  Wonder how feasible is to have an infrastructure server to do the heavy lifting in a place with cheap/reliable computing, and a front-end server that just forwards and maybe does light caching in a country with friendly legislation. But I guess their issue wasn't technical, but that they are an organization subject to Australian law.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Exactly. It turns out the internet has not changed some fundamentals of human existence. Even online, you are either at the mercy of the legal system that can project force onto your body or you push yourself outside the law and are at the mercy of people exploiting you and the fact that you cannot seek recourse in the law. Outside the law, might makes right (inside the law, might also makes right, but one can hope it is at least a right that some large group of people have reached loose consensus on).

Kye 5y ago

It's not just the servers. You also need a CDN that won't shut you down, a host that won't shut you down, and so on. That was a problem for them early on since they started with Cloudflare. Even if you're within their policies, this is a prime target for DDoSes.

stevenicr 5y ago
I've been researching these things a bit here and there. Certainly having hosting and domain names and the infrastructure that does not have a history of shutting people down would be a good start. So yeah godaddy and cloudflare would be out from the start. ddos sucks - been there deal with that a time or two. but yeah, if servers could be replicated in many places, and plans for multiple ways to move to a new domain name, or dns, or ip or whatever and such are already laid, and this info is already given to the users so they can move to new X when Y happens.. I really want to deploy a keybase-like blockchain kind of thing that is auto replicated - and if someone has an individual account blocked in country A then friends of that person would know that another account is already active via service/infrastructure B. I dunno, it seems there are many pieces already out there that could make these things happen - and it's not going to be easy to get it setup at first, and some of the pieces would be blocked in various regions - but give the end users the tools to jump to E F or G... it can be done. The internet is already going in this bifurcated (trifurcated / qua..) direction anyhow and I see no way to stop it, might as well replicate for it.
- sofixa 5y ago
  Do CloudFlare have a history of shutting things down? From what i recall there were two incidents which were extremely egregious (Daily Stormer and a chan) and CloudFlare only acted after months of outside pressure.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > Do CloudFlare have a history of shutting things down? They will readily shut down anything that might expose them to legal liability (i.e. CSAM, credit card fraud). Daily Stormer and the various xChan projects are vile, but mostly legal under US law, in contrast.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      > They will readily shut down anything that might expose them to legal liability Well.. yeah, and so will anyone.
      - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        Stop normalizing censorship. No, "anyone" will not immediately shut down anything that exposes a legal liability.
        mschuster91 5y ago
        > Stop normalizing censorship. We're talking about pedophiles and fraud here. Stuff that is illegal everywhere in the civilized world. As for the Daily Stormer and the xChan projects: the stuff hosted there also violates laws, holocaust denial or many forms of antisemitism are a crime in most of the European Union. And the only people calling that "censorship"... well, they tend to be Nazis or have no problem supporting Nazis.
        inglor_cz 5y ago
        Remember the time when the ACLU fought for the right of American Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois? The leader of the ACLU at that time was a Jewish guy. He didn't like the American Nazis, but he recognized that the bureaucratic machinery used to prevent them from assembling was almost entirely identical to the bureaucratic machinery used against the civil rights movement in the South.
radu_floricica 5y ago
Wonder how feasible is to have an infrastructure server to do the heavy lifting in a place with cheap/reliable computing, and a front-end server that just forwards and maybe does light caching in a country with friendly legislation. But I guess their issue wasn't technical, but that they are an organization subject to Australian law.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Exactly. It turns out the internet has not changed some fundamentals of human existence. Even online, you are either at the mercy of the legal system that can project force onto your body or you push yourself outside the law and are at the mercy of people exploiting you and the fact that you cannot seek recourse in the law. Outside the law, might makes right (inside the law, might also makes right, but one can hope it is at least a right that some large group of people have reached loose consensus on).