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My main Mastodon account is a single-user instance. Mastodon is heavy-duty for that compared to what it could be, and so a better single-user server would be ni

by vidarh 2y ago

My main Mastodon account is a single-user instance. Mastodon is heavy-duty for that compared to what it could be, and so a better single-user server would be nice, but it's also not that big a deal. Incidentally, I'm working on an app server with ActivityPub support at its core, and I have pondered giving it sufficient compatibility with Mastodon to allow repurposing it as a lightweight instance.

rckt 2y ago
Nice, I'm looking forward for something like this. As for the "not a big deal", I get it. But still, it feels overkilling to have a whole instance that has the same capabilities as one with thousands of users, just for yourself.
- vidarh 2y ago
  I mean, I think most of the overkill of Mastodon comes from design choices that stems from building it on Rails. It's possible to do Rails in a lean way, but the "done thing" in Rails is to build a big monolith talking to a full RDBMS, and use Sidekiq for jobs and, and ... I love Ruby, probably more than is good for my sanity (half my desktop stack is written in Ruby), but Rails has always come across to me as overcomplicating things.
zimpenfish 2y ago
> a better single-user server would be nice There's GotoSocial[0], Takahē[1], epicyon[2], etc. [0] https://gotosocial.org https://gotosocial.org [1] https://jointakahe.org https://jointakahe.org [2] https://libreserver.org/epicyon/ https://libreserver.org/epicyon/
- vidarh 2y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions, but all of those seems like marginal improvements at best to me. If I'm going to have to read through a lot of installation instructions, I might as well keep Mastodon... When I was thinking of a "better single-user server", I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container - the Mastodon resource use is less of a problem (unless you run a big instance) than the complexity of it. I do appreciate the suggestions, though. If anything, looking at how others have handled Mastodon API support will be useful.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container GotoSocial is a single binary.
    - vidarh 2y ago
      That got lost to me in the long installation instructions, and the presence of a docker-compose file I didn't look at because its mere presence suggested multiple containers, but I see now it only includes one... To me, the length of those installation instructions is themselves an indication this is still not what I'm after.
      - zimpenfish 2y ago
        Yeah, I can see that they've gone for the "To install GotoSocial, first you must create the universe..." kind of approach to their instructions. Which is a shame because it's just "Download a release, unpack, edit the config, off you go."[0] They could do with a pithy Quickstart page for people who already have domains, servers, etc. [0] My installation is from source and I'd never really seen their installation instructions as they are now.
- xigoi 2y ago
  Also Snac2: https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
  - vidarh 2y ago
    There was a time I'd love something like this in C, but those days are long gone...

by vidarh 2y ago

rckt 2y ago

Nice, I'm looking forward for something like this. As for the "not a big deal", I get it. But still, it feels overkilling to have a whole instance that has the same capabilities as one with thousands of users, just for yourself.

vidarh 2y ago
I mean, I think most of the overkill of Mastodon comes from design choices that stems from building it on Rails. It's possible to do Rails in a lean way, but the "done thing" in Rails is to build a big monolith talking to a full RDBMS, and use Sidekiq for jobs and, and ... I love Ruby, probably more than is good for my sanity (half my desktop stack is written in Ruby), but Rails has always come across to me as overcomplicating things.

zimpenfish 2y ago

> a better single-user server would be nice There's GotoSocial[0], Takahē[1], epicyon[2], etc. [0] https://gotosocial.org https://gotosocial.org [1] https://jointakahe.org https://jointakahe.org [2] https://libreserver.org/epicyon/ https://libreserver.org/epicyon/

vidarh 2y ago
Thanks for the suggestions, but all of those seems like marginal improvements at best to me. If I'm going to have to read through a lot of installation instructions, I might as well keep Mastodon... When I was thinking of a "better single-user server", I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container - the Mastodon resource use is less of a problem (unless you run a big instance) than the complexity of it. I do appreciate the suggestions, though. If anything, looking at how others have handled Mastodon API support will be useful.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container GotoSocial is a single binary.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    That got lost to me in the long installation instructions, and the presence of a docker-compose file I didn't look at because its mere presence suggested multiple containers, but I see now it only includes one... To me, the length of those installation instructions is themselves an indication this is still not what I'm after.
    - zimpenfish 2y ago
      Yeah, I can see that they've gone for the "To install GotoSocial, first you must create the universe..." kind of approach to their instructions. Which is a shame because it's just "Download a release, unpack, edit the config, off you go."[0] They could do with a pithy Quickstart page for people who already have domains, servers, etc. [0] My installation is from source and I'd never really seen their installation instructions as they are now.
xigoi 2y ago
Also Snac2: https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
- vidarh 2y ago
  There was a time I'd love something like this in C, but those days are long gone...