anji
I suggest taking a look at Hetzner for hosting, I have found them very reliable and affordable. And perhaps reach out to admins of some of the larger Mastodon instances for hosting advice.
I’m still a bit sad about Reddit’s seemingly approaching ending. I never cared about Twitter so moving to Mastodon was a snap, but Reddit has had loads of amazing content posted and I’ve enjoyed it for 15+ years. I love the Fediverse, and Lemmy is great, but it may take some time before these platforms and communities can replace Reddit for me.
Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:
- Owning user accounts
- Exclusively host communities
- Serving local and remote users webpages and media
- Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable
Because servers “own” the user accounts and communities it’s not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.
I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.
I guess it’s a bit too late for a redesign now… Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.
Well yeah, point taken that replicating everything everywhere and forever might be impossible. But I do believe at a minimum my identity should be portable and accessing Fedi (ie. in microblogging: posting and viewing a feed of the latest posts of my follows) should be decoupled from which instance I pick to access the Fediverse.
I don’t particularly like how owners of instances which grew are now essentially locked in to having to spend 100s or 1000s of dollars a month keeping their now expensive instances running and providing service. This is a bad place to be for a platform ran by volunteers. Letting instance owners scale their service down as well as up would be ideal. But this requires at least decentralized identity, and at best some form of content hosting redundancy…
It’s easy to say the current architecture of Fedi works when it’s still small. Your instance has 139 users… That’s not intended as a slight. Hosting instances is good and I applaud you for it! But I wish it were easier to more equally share the load once the platform becomes more popular.
Not speaking for anyone but me, but sometimes when people say they something is too political it really means too much “extreme” political views. Personally I don’t want to interact with extreme auth-left or auth-right content. I think politely discussing why access to housing should be guaranteed by government, or arguing for lower corporate taxes or whatever, isn’t what bothers most people.
Fortunately Fedi allows instances who are fine with it host those users, and I don’t have to see it. And Lemmy -the project- isn’t political, it’s just software for which I’m grateful to the devs.
No. And I think it’s a really hard problem. poVoq was right to call me out on full replication being a bad move, because duplicating all content on every server is obviously inefficient. But a solution in-between, with decentralization and redundancy, is probably a very complex challenge. Doesn’t seem impossible, but very complex network protocols rarely seem to succeed.
Edit: Sorry I was still thinking about some fabled perfect protocol. But if you’re looking into decentralized identifiers, W3 is working on one approach. It’s not something I have seen used anywhere or integrated with ActivityPub yet, but that could be the future I’m hoping for. Probably.
No. I am on my own little single-user instance and I can follow, vote, post and reply anywhere from here. It’s just a little awkward sometimes because you have to learn how to paste URLs in the search box, and until you subscribe there will be some missing content. But once you get past that, everything works.