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The self-hosting argument shows how out of touch fediverse developers are.

Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.

It's actually infuriating to read. If it's harder than "App downloaded, account made" then you've already lost. Anything more complex than that is a complete non-starter.

Lost what, exactly ? Contrary to the capitalistic world of Twitter, where bigger faster is always better, the fediverse is not about that. If you don't want to adapt and are just trying to recreate Twitter, it's a complete non-starter.

If bigger/faster/better isn't the goal of the fediverse, then let's stop talking about it right now. All this incoming hype is about Elon and Twitter. Let's agree to stop talking about it. And especiallyt the fediverse needs to step up and say, "We're not a twitter replacement" instead of all this "Welcome aboard! You're in control! Democratize information!" snake oil that they're fueling.

Everyone in the fediverse community says "we're not a twitter replacement". It's a space for taking back control of communication. You don't join the fediverse, you are a part of it and contribute to build it.

I don't know where you got that snake oil but it doesn't reflect the pulse that's been there for years.

Lost the ability to actually reach people. Lost the ability to actually talk with people in your communities. Lost the ability for fucking anybody who isn't a wizard to know how to even read something. I mean Jesus, bulletin boards are easier than this.

How did you lose anything ? The fediverse is one way to communicate. IRC, email, BBS, gopher are all ways plebiscited by fediverse enthusiasts to also communicate because there is no one tool that can do everything. If mastodon is not for you, use something else; no one blames you

>IRC, email, BBS, gopher

You need to take a step back, and look at what the average Joe is actually using. Don't assume that because your programmer friends use these obscure protocols for everyday communication that everyone is.

So average Joe can keep using whatever they're using, fine ! There is no obligation for them to migrate, and there is no reason underpaid overworked volunteers should make it easy for Joe to switch, especially if Joe is not open to change.

A good solution I can see is "choose an interest", with each public mastodon instance having some cheeky emoji and tagline in a list. So if someone typed "makeup" they might filter to the mastodon instance "beauty.social", instead of needing to find beauty.social before even getting started with creating an account.

The risk of this approach is that you are not picking an interest. You are picking an environment with a set of rules and regulation, an environment that has certain physical constraints (response time, scaleability), an environment that decides which instances you can federate with.

Try explaining that with an emoji and a fun tagline.

Then they type "clubbing" or "cars" or "<insert city>" or whatever and see a shit ton of other instances they get to choose from.

This is a *BAD THING* and it's not surprising people here on HN don't see that.

A person typically have multiple interests. Associating yourself with a single interest is usually a bad idea as sooner or later your would want to talk about something else.

It would be way more natural to have interests as channels for a person's account. People could subscribe to only particular interests instead consuming the full stream of the person's posts. I'm not sure if Mastodon supports this, but it's sorely lacking in Twitter.

I’d like to see us get back to using domain names for identity. An influencer celeb could have their own domain and their entire website would be “followed” to provide “updates”

All of their content could be self-hosted: videos, music, ebooks, etc. It’s a rails server, so in theory all of that stuff could be baked in.

> Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host.

Why would you do that in the first place? They can self-host if they want.

They have websites, dont they ?

My hardline 1TB per month up/down data cap says no to that entire idea. Can't selfhost when 1 person requesting a lot means you are out hundreds of dollars.

But I do wish selfhosting was just easy. It shouldn't be this hard.

If a federated protocol causes the average user to use more than 1TB of traffic in a month, then it's a bad protocol.

There very well may be exceptional cases (famous people regularly going viral), but they wouldn't want to be hosting from a home location anyway.

Yes, I'm sure someone like Selena Gomez is going to get her team to self hosting from her EC2 instance /s

The "famous people" care about getting their posts to fans. If you're able to convince and migrate hundreds of millions of teenagers to this self-hosted dream, sure. However, that's just not going to happen.

In this dream, I imagine people like Selena Gomez would pay for a Mastodon account to be hosted by a 3rd party. She would gladly pay thousands of dollars a year for her Twitter account if that was the only way for her to keep it, and not even notice the cost. There will be plenty of Mastodon providers willing to offer five 9s for far less than that.

> five 9s

Lololol. Good lord. Tell me you don't work in product without saying you don't work in product.

She gives zero fucks about Five 9's. Maybe her tech team gives like 1/8 of a fuck, but no more beyond that. She only cares about the number of people she reaches with one tweet/toot/whatever, and simply being faster/self-hosted/data owned/reliable/federated has nothing to do with that.

Does being this abrasive generally result in conversations you feel are productive?

> Maybe her tech team gives like 1/8 of a fuck

r/suspiciouslyspecific

Virality is a big part of social media. The fact that a lot of people wanting to see something I made punishes me with hundreds of dollars worth of overage fees means that it's just bad to use it. You are punished for "succeeding".

It's not about the average user, but when said average user gets their 15 minutes.

As I said, if the protocol itself can't handle this scenario, it's doomed to have low adoption. Unless of course ISPs get pressured into lifting datacaps. Maybe a "viral" clause for exactly these sorts of situations? I think there are multiple potential solutions.

I tried for a few hours to get it running on Portainer and gave up.

Is Tailscale not good enough for a simple tunneling service?

What's a tunneling service? Do I need to use that before I can make a Mastodon account? What app is that on - wait, there are "instances", what the hell is that? Screw it, this is too complicated - I'm going back to twitter.

I completely agree. Which is why tunneling should be built-in to having a domain name. It should be easier than a phone number. You buy a domain from a domain seller and pay them $5/mo to provide tunneling. All the user needs to understand is:

* I install the app

* App requests access to your domain so it can set up appname.yourdomain.com

* I grant permission and we're live.

Tailscale is awesome. One of my two favorite companies alongside fly.io. But these are tools built for sysadmins and developers. Selfhosting needs tools built for the masses.

should be wordpress-level easy at least. But last i checked it wasnt easy.

Otherwise , mastodon hosters will become sneaky corporate spies, ad injectors and data resellers

Just today I paid for a domain name in name.com. As part of the package, they sold me a hosted & managed WordPress installation for $60 USD a year. I was positively impressed (last time I setup a WP server I paid $5 a month for DigitalOcean, which makes it $60 for something I have to manage).

Companies like name.com, godaddy and whatnot should offer that kind of option. Or even AWS should have a "managed mastodon" server maybe. At the end of the day, most companies nowadays have their infrastructure in one of the 4-6 main cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCS, Oracle, ...).

Now if only there was a popular registrar with a streamlined interface that wasn't constantly trying to up sell you.

Personally I would prefer to see registrars limit themselves to providing domain names. But for that to work seamlessly they all need to support an open DNS protocol that makes it easy for users to delegate subdomains to 3rd-party apps and services. Something like DomainConnect[0] but with better support for selfhosting[1].

[0]: https://www.domainconnect.org/

[1]: https://github.com/Domain-Connect/spec/issues/64

Friendica (https://friendi.ca/) is Wordpress-level easy; it's got a similar stack.

Install yunohost. Clicks in a UI.

Install pleroma. Or mastodon. Or pixelfed (for images). Or peertube (for videos). Or plume (for blogging). Clicks in a UI.

That's still way too complex for something that wants to be widely used. It should just be an app on your phone or PC.

The comparison was WordPress. No one installs WordPress on their phone or PC.

or at least that server hosts can support easily like they do with wordpress

That's an interesting point actually. Are there any yunohost providers out there?

But what about step 0: have a working Linux installation with root privileges, and understand all the security implications of operating said installation.

The comparison started with wordpress. The vast majority of installs don't bother with that. Just take a VPS.

To note: WordPress has an ActivityPub plugin, allowing you to have your blog and interact with the wider community.