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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

How would a home node cope with dynamic IPs, not having a registered domain name etc? I mean, my flat broadband connection would allow say 10 Mb both down and uplink dedicated to a small Mastodon instance 24/7 at virtually zero cost without me even noticing, but my ISP changes my IP every night so that I'd be a moving target for anyone willing to connect. Hosting is a solution, but it costs money. Are there any means of connecting a node to the Mastodon network without being forced to look for fixed IP and a DNS name? Admittedly I have no experience with Mastodon, although it intrigues me, so be patient:)

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As far as I know, having a fixed IP address or domain name is a requirement – Mastodon is decentralized in a different way from P2P protocols.

This is one of the reasons that the article I linked to above recommends a community-based approach. friend.camp (Darius' instance) uses a Patreon to cover the (fairly small) costs of hosting, registration, etc. I think a lot of users donate something like $1-$5/ year.

Running an entire server just for personal use may be overkill in terms of time-investment, monetary costs, etc. But for a small group of users these costs are negligible, and the small community still gets the benefits of having a lot of control over how the instance operates (who to federate with, custom features, etc).

We are used to thinking in terms of solutions that are either totally individualistic (everyone for themselves) or rely on giant monolithic institutions. A system made up of small, autonomous communities which can still communicate is a nice middle-ground.

How do you expect to provide a web service without a domain and an ever-changing IP? This isn't a Mastodon problem.

Use a dynamic dns provider, it'll give you a domain name that changes your IP record as it changes.

"How do you expect to provide a web service without a domain and an ever-changing IP?"

My thoughts were that if Mastodon nodes connect each other so that anyone on any node can communicate with anyone on a different node, can't nodes with dynamic IPs set up persistent connections to reachable nodes so that those will work as a sort of DNS?

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