Comment by serverholic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by serverholic | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, after using mastodon I'm a bit more bearish on the fediverse. It's too complex for your average user and there are still significant centralization risks.

Sure anyone can host a server but obviously that's pretty technical.

If you don't host your own server then you place a lot of trust on whoever owns it. They own your data and they decide which external servers to share data with. Want to add a video game centric mastodon server to your feed? Well you better hope your server decides to partner with that server.

Not to mention that servers cost money, so you have to be sure that whoever is hosting it can continue to pay for it. Mastodon the organization is a non profit. Do they have the funds to host millions of people? Probably not. Which means people have to find a smaller server and hope that it stays funded.

This makes choosing your mastodon server a pretty important choice. Most people seem to be going for mastodon official servers which is causing them to be overloaded.

Couldn't all those things be said of centralized services?

I always have the same concerns as you're pointing out, so I don't mean this critically, but reading your comments made me realize most of them could apply equally to either type of system.

Exactly, this is just our boiler plate response to new things and we should ignore it. There are definitely criticisms and conversations to have about the fediverse but you are completely right, this is just an unintentional distraction.

Most of us carry internet connected computers in our pockets now. How difficult would it be to automate setting up a server on android or iOS? Could someone just install an app and have a server available?

The main problem with this idea is battery life. Mobile devices are designed to go to sleep really often to conserve battery, and you can't do that if you're running a server. iOS in particular heavily restricts when and how apps can do stuff while the screen is locked.

I think you are misinterpreting what the parent comment is suggesting. You for sure can’t host a Mastodon server off of a mobile device. I think they were suggesting ‘how hard would it be’ to make a mobile app that would allow anyone to spin up their own Mastodon instance in the cloud.

I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. It’s definitely not a trivial problem to solve, but also not so crazy that it couldn’t be solved with some concerned effort. There are already some 3rd party services that will host your Mastodon for you, but as far as an easy to use mobile app, could be a good business opportunity for anyone with the right motivation.

I don't think that works. The problem is that your server needs to be online 24/7, because any time someone you follow posts a message your server needs to be online and ready to accept effectively a webhook from them.

> your server needs to be online and ready to accept effectively a webhook from them.

The obvious answer there is "ActivityPub over SMTP". There is literally nothing that could go wrong![1]

(Basically a service which holds "ActivityPub postboxes" which collect events when you're offline and you pick them up in a batch when you're back online. The XMPP people already solved this one, IIRC.)

[1] Ok, there might be -some- problems.

Not sure if this might be related, but there is a project who proposes to use XMPP instead of ActivityPub for the ActivityStreams vocabulary: https://inqlab.net/2022-01-17-activitystreams-over-xmpp.html

That’s not what they were saying. Of course, your Mastodon instance need to be hosted on some remote Linux server in the cloud. But imagine you could use a mobile app, that provides the service of handling said instance, & exposes the front end client in the same mobile app? It’s totally feasible.

Can you get a static IP address from a mobile carrier?

Also, you'd need a backup server to render the "I am hiking or driving through a tunnel" error pages.

A raspberry pi is only like $40 also

It's a bit technical to set up. Maybe sell rpis that are already set up to host? Plug n play somehow

Where can you buy a pi for $40?

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