Hacker News Reader

Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

I was about to open a Mastodon account, but because I don't really use to publish anything too often anyway, instead left it for later.

A couple month passed and the instance I had in mind, closed for good.

I've been told before in HN that Mastodon's solution is non-existent for these situations. Has the landscape changed or you're still f*d if you choose the wrong one? (aka. an incentive for centralization or always chosing only among the most popular instances)

View on HN

The solution is to run your own Mastodon instance. Unfortunately, I find doing so can be quite a hassle. Obviously it's not free, and not only do you need to configure it properly, but you need to handle backups, updates and so on. Even for me, with a fair bit of technical experience, it can be challenging. I think there are significant barriers to doing so for people with no or little technical knowledge.

I’m paying a coffee a month for masto.host to do it for me. Great little service.

I went to check on the service, thinking about the 1.50€ a coffee might cost here :) but 6€ (+ taxes!) feels too steep for the value I'd get from it. Bitwarden is my frame of reference at 1€/month, and it is the most valuable tool I pay for, so it's difficult to justify 6 times that just for a social network.

I think this underlines the impression I had that Mastodon software is quite bad in terms of server resources consumption, feels like a very heavy service to host. Probably lots of performance improvements are still achievable, and hopefully hosting it becomes cheaper over time.

> The solution is to run your own Mastodon instance

The problem is that Mastodon isn't really great for single-user instances (hassle to upgrade, slurps resources for breakfast, etc) but there are plenty of other ActivityPub-compatible software that is great for single-user usage, like Pleroma, Micro.blog, Akkoma and more.

I did it with a free VM and wrote a guide here [1]. Zero administration work with docker automatic updates.

[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2023-12-12_mastodon-docker-rootless...

What service did you get your VM from?

Oracle Free Tier

While following a guide can get someone set up quickly, the problem is that they may not have the background to deal with issues/breakage down the road. Maybe it's a botched update, a strange error, or so forth. The security side is also another can of worms and I recommend that people do some reading into this topic before running a public web service.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from writing this - such guides are always appreciated by the community. It's just that I've seen a lot of inexperienced people try setting these things up with a guide and getting bit in the back a couple months later.

Yes, your skepticism makes sense. I am running services since 7 years, so it is not that I did not know what I was getting in.

Thanks. What's stopping someone from creating a .deb that does most/all of this?

You're incentivized to either choose a stable, robust instance, or self-host. A lot of instances are pet projects that people kill off once they get bored of mastodon and don't want to pay for the upkeep anymore.

Self-hosting is the only way to really guarantee that it'll still be up years later. But you might get randomly banned from certain instances that blanket-ban single-user instances.

I've got to say, that doesn't sound like a very good solution.

How are people who aren't already part of the community supposed to know what a stable, robust instance is?

And self-hosting is all very well, but if I wanted to join a community comprised exclusively of greybeard unix sysadmins, I'd use IRC :)

Isn't self-hosting more likely to end up being one of those pet projects that gets killed off?

but if it's a pet project that gets killed off it's because you yourself got bored of it and killed it, it's entirely within your control, not at the whims of someone else

It’s basically analogous to e-mail. To have an e-mail account, you have to choose a host first. Most people choose a popular host (Gmail, Outlook), but there are various reasons one could prefer a different one.

> I've been told before in HN that Mastodon's solution is non-existent for these situations.

What are you worried about losing? You can download everything if it's a concern. Honestly though, the concern you're raising is non-existent on every platform, because the others only have a single instance.

You're equally messed up if your account on a centralised service is banned, in which case you chose the wrong one. You could choose a server that's signed up to the Mastodon Covenant to provide some more peace of mind, and should always take a backup of your account from time-to-time.

I chose a mastodon instance for which the financing is quite clear. I donate once a year. Admin is reactive and all to updates and also use the instance daily.

If somehow I find out admin start not giving updates and updating the instance, or the donations are not meeting the goal I assume I would have time to startup my instance and or move somewhere else.

I really feel there is a need and future growth in distrubuted backup as a service -

A few of us should get together and make a 'backup your stuff service' that can pull from mastodon and any other service, and make 2 backups in two different places around the world.

Offer addons for storing BnW copies of pics maybe, addon's for other services.

Should login, add link to your thing, walk through authorizing whatever is needed, and getting an email or DM that backup succeeds every week or something.

Run your own blog, on your own domain with github. It takes like 2 hours to setup and costs $20/year. Lately, it really feels like the whole "social media" decade was a dead end.

what 20$? I am running it for free except for domain name cost.

Can you share your setup/tech stack?

I’m guessing that’s what their $20/year is for. GitHub pages lets you use your own domain once you buy it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com