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There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's writte

There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in terms of memory & cpu usage. DB backend is postgres. It's also by default far less cache heavy than Mastodon (which caches every external attachment, avatar and header locally, which causes a lot of issues since it's the main reason instances run out of disk space). Featurewise it actually surpasses Mastodon on almost everything except for not offering a tweetdeck-like UI. [1]: https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/

knewter 4y ago
1) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox is a frontend that works atop either mastodon, pleroma, or the rebased backend 2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better maintained than pleroma
- noirscape 4y ago
  I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a technical decision he forced through after it was deemed to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch of alternate endpoints to avoid having to use WebFinger for his personal frontend). He also had a history of more bad technical decisions to make Pleroma's backend cause problems with with the rest of the fediverse if the rest of the fediverse doesn't use his custom frontend and insulting developers who pushed back on that decision[2]. Better maintenance seems like a really dubious claim when the lead maintainer is this unwilling to co-operate with the existence of other tooling and openly insults anyone disagreeing with his technical decisions. There's also a couple of PR reasons to not want to associate with him, but those are largely off-topic. The rest of the Pleroma project by contrast is fairly stable and it's developer team has been nothing but polite when it comes to handling support issues. [1]: https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ [2]: https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Maintainance https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Mainta...
  - knewter 4y ago
    I know Alex. He's a really good dude.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    Can we stop villifying people we disagree with? I've seen it so much, I'm more inclined to believe it absolutely didn't happen that way.
    - afavour 4y ago
      Is it vilifying when you provide sources of a person's negative behavior? "I'd recommend against this open source project because it has a solo author who has a track record of not playing well with each others" strikes me as statement of fact, not vilifying.
      - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        About a month ago I had a mechanic call me pissed and tell me they didn't want to work with me anymore if I didn't trust them. I had been asking questions over text. That this happened is a statement of fact. I'm taking my old ford explorer over to him this weekend. Do you know why? Because I asked him what was wrong and explained the intent of the questions. We've had a working relationship for over 2 years, he was obviously having a bad day. No harm, no foul, humans are humans. And yet, his negative behavior is a statement of fact. Imagine if I then went around town telling everyone not to use this man because he "doesn't play well with others". I mean, it's only a statement of fact, right? Point of fact, the engine light in the truck came on earlier this week, I called him up and then drove it over so he could check codes (O2 sensor needs replacing). Had a conversation with him, where he told me his wife is living in Arizona to be a live-in baby sitter for their kids new baby, and he drives over there every other weekend (I knew his wife was in Arizona, but didn't know why). You're campaigning against a piece of software because you don't like the author. Not for technical reasons, but because the author "forced" (your words) stuff onto other people, then after these innocents reverted it back in defense of the whole of fediverse and he got mad and said mean stuff, so now we need to defend the reader (me, and everyone else) from his meanness. If you say so.
berkes 4y ago
I'm aware of Pleroma, but didn't mention it because I find that allthough it's easier than mastodon, it hardly is simpler. And being easier, IMO, isn't enough. The focus of pleroma is very much on the "lightweight" part. Which is good, bc that also desparately needs a solution. But we really need something that is all of it: easy, simple and lightweight. Not just easier and lightweight.
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  Epicyon might be worth a look: https://libreserver.org/epicyon/ https://libreserver.org/epicyon/
davexunit 4y ago
Having used Mastodon for years now, my experience has been that when I receive an abusive/spam/troll message it's a safe bet that it was from a Pleroma instance. I know I'm lot alone in defaulting to distrusting users on Pleroma instances. Just something for new fediverse users to keep in mind.
- fkgncawhlp 4y ago
riffic 4y ago
> There are plenty of other choices. There's even WordPress, with a plugin. A lot of ~~people~~ entities such as companies, organizations, etc have a WordPress site. edit: Pretend this site supports basic formatting in comments?
- berkes 4y ago
  I know this exists. As does NextCloud. But what solution or use-case does it serve? I honestly cannot see it. Neither for WP nor for NC. ActivityPub is -aside from a protocol- something that is designed for social networking mostly. How does "adding a WP plugin" help? Why would I want to connect my blog or website to this fediverse? Is it just so people can get my blogposts in their timeline? Because that's the only use-case I can see, and that problem is easily solved with RSS (and a bot).
  - vidarh 4y ago
    I don't know how Wordpress or NextCloud uses it, but for my own use I'm considering building a comment system for my sites around in, on the basis that having comments about my posts exposed to the fediverse seems like a good way of increasing reach. (there's the challenge of length; there's no problem upping the post-length for comments etc., but many instances will reject them, so you do face the issue of having to replace the body of longer comments with a link to a page, which is sub-optimal but doable)
- xani_ 4y ago
  Wordpress have same problem of being slow POS that in addition needs to be constantly updated for security issues. Hell, we even got one of our clients (we just provided hosting for some of their stuff) getting half-hacked while setting it up (they were not exactly the developer type). Half-hacked because we required app-to-internet traffic to be ran by proxy so the final payload didn't get downloaded on the server, hilariously enough.

knewter 4y ago

1) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox is a frontend that works atop either mastodon, pleroma, or the rebased backend 2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better maintained than pleroma

noirscape 4y ago
I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a technical decision he forced through after it was deemed to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch of alternate endpoints to avoid having to use WebFinger for his personal frontend). He also had a history of more bad technical decisions to make Pleroma's backend cause problems with with the rest of the fediverse if the rest of the fediverse doesn't use his custom frontend and insulting developers who pushed back on that decision[2]. Better maintenance seems like a really dubious claim when the lead maintainer is this unwilling to co-operate with the existence of other tooling and openly insults anyone disagreeing with his technical decisions. There's also a couple of PR reasons to not want to associate with him, but those are largely off-topic. The rest of the Pleroma project by contrast is fairly stable and it's developer team has been nothing but polite when it comes to handling support issues. [1]: https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/ [2]: https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Maintainance https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%20Mainta...
- knewter 4y ago
  I know Alex. He's a really good dude.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  Can we stop villifying people we disagree with? I've seen it so much, I'm more inclined to believe it absolutely didn't happen that way.
  - afavour 4y ago
    Is it vilifying when you provide sources of a person's negative behavior? "I'd recommend against this open source project because it has a solo author who has a track record of not playing well with each others" strikes me as statement of fact, not vilifying.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      About a month ago I had a mechanic call me pissed and tell me they didn't want to work with me anymore if I didn't trust them. I had been asking questions over text. That this happened is a statement of fact. I'm taking my old ford explorer over to him this weekend. Do you know why? Because I asked him what was wrong and explained the intent of the questions. We've had a working relationship for over 2 years, he was obviously having a bad day. No harm, no foul, humans are humans. And yet, his negative behavior is a statement of fact. Imagine if I then went around town telling everyone not to use this man because he "doesn't play well with others". I mean, it's only a statement of fact, right? Point of fact, the engine light in the truck came on earlier this week, I called him up and then drove it over so he could check codes (O2 sensor needs replacing). Had a conversation with him, where he told me his wife is living in Arizona to be a live-in baby sitter for their kids new baby, and he drives over there every other weekend (I knew his wife was in Arizona, but didn't know why). You're campaigning against a piece of software because you don't like the author. Not for technical reasons, but because the author "forced" (your words) stuff onto other people, then after these innocents reverted it back in defense of the whole of fediverse and he got mad and said mean stuff, so now we need to defend the reader (me, and everyone else) from his meanness. If you say so.

berkes 4y ago

I'm aware of Pleroma, but didn't mention it because I find that allthough it's easier than mastodon, it hardly is simpler. And being easier, IMO, isn't enough. The focus of pleroma is very much on the "lightweight" part. Which is good, bc that also desparately needs a solution. But we really need something that is all of it: easy, simple and lightweight. Not just easier and lightweight.

proactivesvcs 4y ago
Epicyon might be worth a look: https://libreserver.org/epicyon/ https://libreserver.org/epicyon/

davexunit 4y ago

Having used Mastodon for years now, my experience has been that when I receive an abusive/spam/troll message it's a safe bet that it was from a Pleroma instance. I know I'm lot alone in defaulting to distrusting users on Pleroma instances. Just something for new fediverse users to keep in mind.

fkgncawhlp 4y ago

riffic 4y ago

> There are plenty of other choices. There's even WordPress, with a plugin. A lot of ~~people~~ entities such as companies, organizations, etc have a WordPress site. edit: Pretend this site supports basic formatting in comments?

berkes 4y ago
I know this exists. As does NextCloud. But what solution or use-case does it serve? I honestly cannot see it. Neither for WP nor for NC. ActivityPub is -aside from a protocol- something that is designed for social networking mostly. How does "adding a WP plugin" help? Why would I want to connect my blog or website to this fediverse? Is it just so people can get my blogposts in their timeline? Because that's the only use-case I can see, and that problem is easily solved with RSS (and a bot).
- vidarh 4y ago
  I don't know how Wordpress or NextCloud uses it, but for my own use I'm considering building a comment system for my sites around in, on the basis that having comments about my posts exposed to the fediverse seems like a good way of increasing reach. (there's the challenge of length; there's no problem upping the post-length for comments etc., but many instances will reject them, so you do face the issue of having to replace the body of longer comments with a link to a page, which is sub-optimal but doable)
xani_ 4y ago
Wordpress have same problem of being slow POS that in addition needs to be constantly updated for security issues. Hell, we even got one of our clients (we just provided hosting for some of their stuff) getting half-hacked while setting it up (they were not exactly the developer type). Half-hacked because we required app-to-internet traffic to be ran by proxy so the final payload didn't get downloaded on the server, hilariously enough.