Earlier today a comrade got a pretty good tankie instance for Mastodon on this post of theirs. So I was thinking, due such things exist for other federated platforms such as Pixelfed and Peertube? And if so, which are the best for our purposes?
Earlier today a comrade got a pretty good tankie instance for Mastodon on this post of theirs. So I was thinking, due such things exist for other federated platforms such as Pixelfed and Peertube? And if so, which are the best for our purposes?
No, there are not other, and I think we should proceed with care. Hosting fees are a burden specially for something that might die, I don’t think a Pixelfed instance would be so useful now since the platform in general doesn’t have much activity as Mastodon does. On the PeerTube case, it would be nice, but videos require a lot of storage space, increasing hosting fees even more, so it gets complicated.
We also have a Matrix instance, which is hosted by Genzedong people.
A BookWyrm instance where book clubs could be formed around would be a really nice idea.
Whoa, I’d totally be up for hosting a bookwyrm instance. I’ll forward this to the mod team.
2nded on peertube. It’s wonderful software, but it’s a massive hard drive expense for anyone who runs one, and not as good as just using torrents for the same purpose.
(I’ve lost track: do you still have a personal downvoter? Or does someone dislike books or torrents?)
Its a personal downvoter, I know who it is, nbd.
omg your a celeb
Ah, I see. I wouldn’t pay it much attention, then. Keep posting!
That would be great if it is in your capacity to do so!
We need to start an initiative of publicly archiving and torrenting socialist content from places like YouTube where it is absolutely not safe.
Agreed. At the very least socialist channels should be creating torrents of their content and posting them either here, or on their own sites or fediverse accounts.
I’d be interested in using IPFS for this as well, because you can use an IPFS gateway to provide a regular hyperlink for people who don’t have a torrent client, and because IPFS is immutable.
These are good points. Is there also a danger that someone with bad intentions can offer to host federated instances? That may be more of an issue where hosting requires more than a server on a Raspberry Pi…
Otherwise, it’s nice to know what other online spaces exist, but I wonder how many are needed. I suppose people want different things from their social media, but I can’t really manage more than one at a time. Respect for those who can juggle multiple platforms at once!
I don’t think the first part is too complicated to get over it, but yeah.
And I totally agree, I can barely keep up with Lemmygrad and Matrix, lol.
Luckily, this is where all the cool kids are. So at least we’re in the right place.
Most hosting nowadays requires no more than a Raspberry Pi. You’d be surprised how well modern well-written programs (that aren’t written in JS and/or Python) can take advantage of compute resources. For example, I host my personal matrix homeserver off of just a single RockPro64 (more powerful Raspberry Pi alternative) using Dendrite, which is written in Go. That SBC also has other things running at the same time, and it handles all of that just fine with lots of capacity left over.
That’s impressive. I guess much of the processing requirements of corporations is due to the ‘extras’ – all the ads and the data harvesting?
Does that mean you can get away with a relatively slow internet connection / upload-download limit? I know hosting sites are always trying to sell the biggest packages.
That is, of course, part of it, but most of the reason is the inefficiency of most companies nowadays. These companies will write their programs in languages like Python and JS which can’t take advantage of resources to their full extent, and then instead of optimizing them or rewriting them in another language, they just get more servers because it’s easier.
In fact, if you were to go on something like r/programming and ask for advice about which programming language to switch to because your program is slow, the advice you’ll usually get is “just get more servers”. It’s really inefficient, bad for the environment, and just lazy.
This trend is continuing beyond just hosting. Look at Electron. Essentially, it’s a project that allows people to make a webapp and then pretend it’s a desktop application by bundling a chromium browser and exposing some OS APIs. Essentially, this means when you open an electron “app”, you’re actually opening a browser that is acting as if it was an app. You can imagine how many compute resources are wasted just on running browsers. Examples of such apps are Discord and Slack. It’s extremely inefficient. Companies are using it because it’s cheaper and easier for them to just ask their already existing web devs to write an “app” than to hire new devs who can write a native GUI.
I really hate this trend if you haven’t noticed already.
Yes. I’m using a 200 download, 20 upload connection. It does mean that file hosting is slow, but other than that, things are surprisingly fast.
Ah that makes sense. I’ve heard of that, with the browsers. I think MS Teams for OSX runs as you describe. Apparently it makes it almost impossible to use other apps at the same time because Teams is so intensive.
Yes, MS Teams is an electron app. Actually, I believe they’re bundling Edge instead of Chromium, but Edge is a Chromium browser anyway, so there isn’t much difference.
BookWyrm is written in Python, it is really slow, lol.
Hosting costs depend on where you’re hosting things. I host quite a lot, and for this reason, I’ve built what is essentially a mini datacenter inside my room (it’s literally right next to me right now, I’m looking at it). It’s mostly ARM SBCs, but you’d be surprised how much they can accomplish. I have plenty of capacity for whatever I may need to host in the near future. Because they are ARM devices, they are extremely power efficient, so all of this takes no more than 40W of power.
I’ve always love DBCs for this purpose! I make use of them wherever viable for the use case.
Yes, they are very nice. I am especially liking my Rock5B, which is an RK3588 machine. That thing beats all my other SBCs by far, while being so efficient that I’ve gotten away with just having a fan next to it with no heatsink and it still gets better temps than my raspberry pis that have a heatsink and fan.
That sounds incredible, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for it when I’m next shopping for SBCs.
These are all fair points. I agree that for the time being, while resources are slim, we should take care not to over expend them. I simply thought that is they did exist, it would be nice to take advantage of them. As things currently stand the only other instance that would make sense is probably a BookWyrm instance, but sense I know little of the logistics for the platform even that might be quite a strain on resources. Thank you!
Oh, don’t worry, I just think Pixelfed doesn’t many people in general, a Mastodon instance would allow for us to interact with other stuff not only Marxism related at least (I saw George Takei has an account there, for example), for discussion is not that helpful IMO. So I think Pixelfed is pointless at this stage, hopefully in the future. PeerTube sounds really nice but it requires a lot of space, still, if someone out there has the resources, please do it. A BookWyrm account would probably be super easy to deploy and not heavy on resources since you only store text/metadata and some images, that’d be the easiest of them all.
No I wasn’t worried or anything, regardless, thank you for your detailed responses and willingness to reiterate when you feel you didn’t quite get your point across.