Hacker News Reader

Comment by lovethevoid | Hacker News Reader

Advertising networks get away with so much, it's quite ridiculous. The same company that will ban your account for posting about such content, will regularly run ads about such content. Worse, there's nothing you can do about it except run ad blockers (which they in turn will use various measures as punishment for you doing so).

Guess we didn't learn anything from Cambridge Analytica.

View on HN

I'm trying to get more into self hosting and things like federation that can allow technical people to be admins of low-maintenance services for their friends and family.

It's a slow push but it's gonna happen. Microtransactions are stuck in deployment hell, advertisements are a deal with the devil, and this is the only third option I know of

I don't think widespread self-hosting will ever be easy enough, since anything that makes it easy enough for anyone to do necessarily has as much control over your account as Elon Musk does. Plus it costs a few bucks a month. But what might be possible is widespread co-op-hosting - run one for your whole family or friend group.

You might be interested in my AGPL federated social network, Jonline, which I've built specifically for this purpose. Source is at https://github.com/JonLatane/jonline, and I have a few instances up at https://jonline.io ("flagship"/demo server), https://bullcity.social (Durham, NC community), and https://oakcity.social (Raleigh, NC community).

It's a pure Rust server so it's extremely lightweight to self-host compared to things like Mastodon, plus it supports events (with iCal/Google Calendar export). I'm also happy to host an instance on my DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster for anyone interested and integrate it into my CI/CD pipeline, which is an option on my GitHub sponsors page (and I'm working on a load balancer which should eventually bring the cost of this down as well).

If I am self-hosting, while lightweight is good, what I really need is the ability to

    apt-get install yourpackage

That's the only way somewhat non-software-engineers will use a self-hosted solution.

I appreciate the feedback! While I haven't had plans to ship binaries to platform-specific package managers, I'll certainly consider it. (I do have plans to publish it to Cargo, but have yet to get to that.) PRs for this would be very welcome, as I have no experience shipping things to apt/yum/etc. :)

In the meantime, it is available pre-packaged as a Docker image for both x86-64 and ARM64: https://hub.docker.com/r/jonlatane/jonline

hi Jon! We've worked together before! Fun to see you randomly on the internet. Love the name "Jon-line"

Dare!!!! Yay!

Agreed, also a lot of room for improvement in this general area. I remember when Mastodon instances used to be a giant pain to get up and going, and now there's one click deploys and even entire businesses who will manage your server.

I'm surprised that cops haven't started arresting people for receiving ads about contraband, which would imply (to a cop brain) that they must be creating the demand for such items.

They do? If I got the NYT to print an ad for crack what would happen to me and the NYT?

There are loopholes in the US currently for drug advertisements. As an example, a very simplistic one so don't take it as legal gospel - while you cannot advertise Ketamine as a pharmaceutical on print or tv you can advertise "direct to consumer" on social media/web as long as your company doesn't specifically pack/distribute the drugs themselves.

I reckon NYT might be a little more tuned into this due to still being a news org with print still going and likely having more restrictions on their web ads due to this, but other platforms you could get away with that no problem as noted from various sources like https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5p38b/ketamine-therapy-inst... and https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/opinion/ketamine-ads-depr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com