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My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
- akho 3y agoI miss the old way of having an RSS reader, an RSS feed, and trackbacks. Maybe OpenID for comments. I also don’t see what we gain from all the extra complexity.
- thomoco 3y agoThis is inspiring. We're seeing some momentum now with the internet pendulum swinging back in the direction of the distributed and federated platform that it was originally intended to be. Interoperability via standards-based protocols provides choice of providers and methods, and helps to limit the influence of walled gardens and ad-based services. I expect to see a number of services and providers arising that will offer good data privacy controls and an ad-free experience with funding via a reasonable monthly fee. Well done!
- bravetraveler 3y agoMay it survive The Hug /s, kinda. Peertube may help
- jeena 3y agoI'm surprised how well it handles it, the load average never went over 3.
- bravetraveler 3y agoThat'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 3y agoI'm using Hetzner and a CX31 shared VCPU https://www.hetzner.com/cloud 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 3y agoThis 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 3y ago> 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)
- unicorn_hunter 3y agoAmazing, would be nice to have a compiled setup script that can be easily adapted. Kudos!
- self_awareness 3y agoI'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 3y agoAh, 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 3y agoPeertube is supposed to be peer to peer but even though there's 8 seeders right now I can't even watch the video...
- rglullis 3y agoAFAIK, Peertube is only p2p when the normal streaming server is overloaded.
- liotier 3y agoI watched it smoothly and the peer count was 3.
- INTPenis 3y agoI'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 3y agoObviously 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.
- discardedrefuse 3y agoI 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 3y agoIf 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.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoYou 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 3y agoYou 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 3y ago> 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/reblogs 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
- paulnpace 3y agoVideo 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 3y agoCensorship 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 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.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoIf 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 3y ago> 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 3y agoYeah, 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.
- renegat0x0 3y agoMy 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 3y agoI 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neogodless 3y ago> 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 https://hachyderm.io/tags/cybertruck to https://mastodon.social/tags/cybertruck 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 3y agoThere 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.
- wccrawford 3y agoI 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.
- mbirth 3y agoAn “instance” here being just a walled-off process running inside its own chroot environment. IIRC Lemmy needs 4: frontend, backend, database and imagestore. It doesn’t need much resources when running, though.
- callalex 3y agoHow much data throughput does it use in a typical month? My home connection is heavily metered because I live in a failed state with regulatory capture.
- mbirth 3y agoThat massively depends on how many groups you subscribe to. I'm running my local instance for slightly over 6 months now, have subscribed to around 30 groups/communities/subs and my local storage shows 2.7GB in the pictrs directory and 2.8GB in the Postgres directory.
- jeena 3y agoYeah 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 3y agoCouldn'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.
- smcleod 3y agoVideo loaded perfectly and quicker than YouTube!
- throwaway290 3y agoIt 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 3y agoWhat browser do you use? I'm on Firefox 120.
- throwaway290 3y agoCurrent Safari. Why is it a question?
- WolfeReader 3y agoBecause if the dev wants to fix the site for your browser, knowing what browser to target is absolutely essential. In this case, it sounds like the devs specifically targeted Safari to not be supported. You could try to get around this with a user agent spoof, though.
- throwaway290 3y agoBut isn't it just text? Any browser even lynx is capable of showing text. Or is some marker like [video] or something else missing from the title?
- WolfeReader 3y agoYou 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.)
- throwaway290 3y agoIt doesn't matter what my browser is, it could be Lynx for all you know and it should still be readable.
- tiberius_p 3y agoIs 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.
- callalex 3y agoWhy not just use the hosted server all the time at that point?
- hammyhavoc 3y agoCost? Spin it up when the local server goes down, spin it down when it comes back up.
- jeena 3y agoNot 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 3y agoThinking 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 3y agoI don't think a static Mastodon or Lemmy is very useful. For PeerTube that might be something to consider.
- kome 3y agoI'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 3y agoInstead 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 3y agoThis 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.
- apitman 3y agoOne 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.
- myaccountonhn 3y agoThere is a lot of work being done on this. I personally think initiatives like activiypod and vocata are interesting and would solve it well. They focus on being standard Activitypub implementations that others can subscribe to.
- Workaccount2 3y agoA blockchain might actually be a decent solution for this. Just make it so the tokens don't have value.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoThis is impossible, sorry. blockchain is before anything else, a very opinonated implementation of applied economic theory. The technology is secondary and consequent to the belief that people as a whole cannot be trusted to take care of things that they do not pay for. I say this is someone who is far from a fan of blockchain anything, but there's no getting around the fact that it is impossible to divorce it from its core principle, which is that pay to play has to be baked into the system at its deepest foundation. And as soon as you introduce this, pay for the many becomes profit for the few, and inevitably markets, trading, and rent-seeking cartels form who swiftly capture the natural value confluence points of the system, reversing any decentralizing tendencies it may have, and collapsing it back towards centralization in order to consolidate and protect their advantaged position.
- dartos 3y agoThere 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 3y agoI 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 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.
- ZacnyLos 3y agoSo good post, thanks!