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?
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.