from Hacker News

Call to Action: Fediverse Media Server

by mikro2nd on 5/26/24, 7:48 AM with 20 comments

• by rglullis on 5/26/24, 10:06 AM

  If you really, absolutely want to continue using Mastodon, support this: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/28554.

  If you just want to run a single-user instance on the cheap: forget Mastodon! Takahe [0] does not require one whole server for each user and it has substantial lower TCO. A "small instance" for Mastodon can not be realistically be found for less than $10/month today , while I can offer Takahe for $39 per year [1].

  But if you want to make the Fediverse really, really cheap to operate, lets rethink the whole server-centric approach and put some effort to develop applications that are primarily based on the client [2]

  [0] https://jointakahe.org

  [1] https://communick.com/takahe

  [2] https://raphael.lullis.net/a-plan-for-social-media-less-fedi...

• by urza on 5/26/24, 10:51 AM

  I am in your comments telling you that federated server is still just someone else's computer.

  But there are systems where user is sovereign, defined by their key, not dependent on any masters. One such system is Nostr:

  https://nostr.com/

• by echelon on 5/26/24, 9:13 AM

  This would all be solved if we treated P2P social media as ephemeral. That's a much more tractable problem.

  Imagine that you have 48 hours to converse on a thread and grab its content, then it's gone. Third party software could archive if you wanted, but it wouldn't be an infrastructure requirement.

  It'd be so much easier to serve that peer nodes could easily be stood up on residential / commodity hardware and could reasonably be expected to handle serving large portions of the discussion graph.

• by zelphirkalt on 5/26/24, 9:14 AM

  Currently I support an instance only minimally, but probably enough to pay for the cost incurred by my usage. If every user did it, not instance owner would ever have financial worries. However, I would support more, if I got some guarantees, that media is also hosted on some bare metals or so, away from S3 or Fastly or similar services, that put data i to the hands of big players.

• by asmor on 5/26/24, 8:33 AM

  I always thought Pleroma solved this problem much more elegantly: proxy the media from the origin, and cache a set amount of data.

  Also respects other people deleting their servers/media and prevents someone posting CSAM becoming a problem for everyone.