building your own mastodon server is stupid

[solarbird]

but, well, i have the dumb, so i made one lol

dunno if i'm gonna keep it yet but

@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net

Comments

[wrog]

Anything in particular that's making it stupid?

Admittedly, I'm sort of unclear on how this decentralized social media thing is supposed to work. Are there well-known servers that people trust? Who runs them?

Or are you concerned about how you're going to get people to trust your own server? Have the mastodon developers come up with a good way to do reputation scoring?

Or is this like running your own email server, (where the moment you open port 25 you get buried in spam)?

[solarbird]

Anything in particular that's making it stupid?

Install is from source and a pain in the arse.

I'm sort of unclear on how this decentralized social media thing is supposed to work. Are there well-known servers that people trust? Who runs them?

There are! But I'm running my own.

Or are you concerned about how you're going to get people to trust your own server?

Oh hell no, this is going to be an invitation server. And there's not an algorithm, it's just who you follow, and you can follow cross-server.

It's feeling like a mix of usenet and livejournal but with ... slightly better search. Usenet Twitter more or less. So far.

But I've only had the server up a couple of hours so who even knows :D

[wrog]

And there's not an algorithm, it's just who you follow, and you can follow cross-server.

Right, I'm just wondering how that works when you piss somebody off (as will inevitably happen) and they launch the botnet to down-vote your server everywhere, and then the cross-server stuff stops working because nobody trusts you anymore. I mean, I'd like to think they've given this some thought and learned various lessons since PGP, but I don't know if they have...

[merelydovely]

Downvote on third-party ranking sites, or...? I didn't think there was a way to upvote or downvote servers. You can block interaction from specific servers if you control a server of your own (this is how most people handle known fascist servers) but I don't think there's any sort of...reputation feature? Even search is pretty locked down bc it was designed with "people who've been harassed on twitter and FB" foremost in mind.

[wrog]

I guess what I'm unclear on is, if there isn't a reputation feature or some kind of third-party ranking, how do you learn that sites are nazi sites without having to review each of them individually and wade through their shit?

Or if it really is that each server operator has to maintain their own blacklist, how does this scale?

[merelydovely]

I think server instances publish their blacklists and you just copy the blacklist of a server you trust for old known problems, then word of mouth gets around for new ones.

Probably doesn't scale that well, but twitter blocking didn't scale thaaaat well either, not without catching a ton of people in automated blocklists they had no reason to be on

[wrog]

it seems they are talking about this, though I also see this issue's been open since 2019.

(from a discussion under someone wanting to defederate from mastodon.social)

[prettyarbitrary]

I hope you find you enjoy it!

Or...that you don't and you get those hours of your life back. :D

But tbh I admire the effort. It's an interesting learning experience, and if you find it worthwhile there are lots of people out there looking for a place to land right now!

[merelydovely]

Where do the servers themselves live? I assumed one bought space through a hosting service or something rather than going through Mastodon itself, although I guess it would make sense for Mastodon to sell server space...

(I realize I could easily google this, but it would be cool to have it casually explained by someone I know!)

[solarbird]

Mine lives in my house!

Most people are probably running them through cohosts. But it doesn't have to. I don't think "Mastodon" sells server space, I mean, it's an open-source software project. There are a couple of nonprofits running the bigger servers, but that's not the same thing.

Also, while I've looked at this before and considering setting up before, I'm also very new to all this. I just learn quickly.

[merelydovely]

It's cool that you're running it right out of your house! Do you have a whole server rack, just the one blade, a raspberry pi...?

I'm still in the 'thinking about it' stage but I was definitely thinking about making a tiny insular server for any twitter refugees from the fan servers I moderate.

[solarbird]

A... huh. Well... technically, yes, we have a server rack.

It's made of lumber. And it has computers on it. And a KVM. So it counts.

And it's a big upgrade from the old metal wire shelving with the open-motherboard compy we used to have.

This will make compy nr. 4 on the rack, and there's not room. I may need to buy smaller cases. This one is beige and from 1999! And the size of a small boulder. No, smaller than that. But.

[merelydovely]

o(￣▽￣)ｄ

All a server really is is a computer that never gets turned off, right? Basically?

Sadly we don't have that kind of space in our townhouse, but if I bought an actual server blade I could probably stick it in the closet...

[solarbird]

Basically, yeah. And unless they're graphics production servers, very little video capability. (You wouldn't game on them.)

Blades are noisy as fuck though, and surprisingly large.

Honestly, if you want to do something like that - specifically run a server for... most things, really... - and physical space is an issue, get a small microATX case with decent venting (better and higher cost, Fractal Torrent Nano, okay but lower cost Cooler Master Q300L).

Then get an microATX motherboard that is NOT specifically labelled for gaming, and, say, a recent i5-level processor with TDP less than 100 watts, and integrated graphics. (Intel: anything that does NOT say "discreet graphics required," AMD anything that's called an APU, iirc.) If you have a 65 watt max TDP processor, you're probably fine with the stock cooler. If you go over that, maybe go overkill on the cooler, but stick with air cooling, you don't need water. And the only reason I'm even saying that is because closet.

16GB of RAM will be fine for anything you want to run out of a closet - hell, 8GB would be fine really - and whatever storage you need.

NO graphics card, that's why you have onboard graphics.

That would run pretty much anything you'd want to run in a closet and take up meaningfully less functional space than a server blade. The only exception maybe would be if you wanted to also run a NAS on it, since it's nice to at least have the possibility of hot swapping hard drives if and when they fail.

You could still do it, and if you do, get a dedicated NAS card with hardware support, it'll be faster.

Then just make sure it has access to airflow (which is why I don't really recommend actual closets) and you're good to go.

You can get smaller than that if you have more money and want to learn more stuff. Size is all about the cooling. You can get a server down to the size of a PS4 without working too hard, you just have to know more about what you're doing. And you can get even smaller - hell, you could absolutely run a decent server for a lot of stuff off a NUC.

So size doesn't have to matter. It's more about the cooling.

[merelydovely]

Hmm, thanks. My husband is the tech guy so I'll probably just point him at this comment. That Torrent Nano would probably fit under my desk...

[wrog]

There's also the small matter of getting an internet connection with a static IP .

[wrog]

which is essentially the biggest ongoing expense for the server in my house (figure $25/month minimum; our bill is bigger because I have a block of 16 IPs at the moment and you really only need 1) and what was typically the biggest obstacle whenever I tried to encourage other people to run servers in their houses (admittedly it's been 10+ years since I last tried to do this).

Whether you can get it and whether you can get it without a whole lot of extra shit added on that you don't need will depend a lot on who your service provider is. Most residential providers are clueless about static IP. (theoretically, a bridged connection with a static IP is the simplest thing in the world but it's not what most people do, so it confuses them...)

[merelydovely]

You've probably seen this floating around - advice to US-based instance admins about how to prepare for possible DMCA notices in the future: https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1593819064161665024

[solarbird]

I have been aggressively sharing that around and our site is in compliance.

[merelydovely]

Awesome!

I'm looking into it for my own potential use later - I'd probably want to pay for a designated agent that is NOT me so I don't have to publical list my address, I think

[solarbird]

Due to reasons, I have a box I can use, so I have. ^_^

[merelydovely]

Oh right, the DMCA one can just be a box! I was mixing it up with the registered nonprofit rules 😅