@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

polotek

@polotek@social.polotek.net

Web developer, movie buff, and pretty much the best guy you know. Married to
@operaqueenie

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polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I started down this road because I asked about seeing a full activity log on my own server instance. And it turns out you just can't.

My goal is to make it easy to stand up two separate mastodon instances on my laptop. Then I can get them to talk to reach other and observe what is actually happening. I think that'll teach me a lot

https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112453817656490883

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@thisismissem why do you say that? K8s isn't what I think of when I want something simple.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@jenniferplusplus nice. I'll check it out. All of the docker-compose solutions look somewhat similar. They all seem to make sense. They just don't work easily when I try them. I've been trying to get away with skipping SSL termination since it's all local. But I guess you can't really avoid it? You need a domain, and chrome forces SSL for anything that's not localhost. So if this is a pain in the ass.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@jenniferplusplus oh wow. That's not what I would've expected. Is that a rails thing or specific to mastodon?

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@jenniferplusplus @konnorrogers I think I understand a bunch of the security concerns. You need have some confidence that the server you're talking to is the one you expect. But it should be more than possible to relax those layers in a trusted environment.

polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

What's wild about this is that it sounds similar to the thing Microsoft just announced and is putting in all Windows computers.
https://mastodon.social/@zackwhittaker/112486102998856636

polotek, to random
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I've spent the last several days trying to get a local mastodon build running on my laptop. I've gotten pretty far, but I have yet to see an actual UI in my browser.

So far, I've been trying out various attempts to run it in docker. That should be easier than trying to get the various components set up myself. But for some reason it's not. Getting mastodon configured properly is pretty complex. Getting everything right "out of the box" feels pretty error prone.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

For one thing, I feel like rails really doesn't wanna be run in a container. Most of the challenges I've run into have been about rails. There are many other moving parts though. And maybe I just haven't gotten to those issues yet because rails tends to complain first.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I also don't mind admitting that I'm going about this in a fairly lazy way. I was hoping to just get someone running that I could poke at and explore from the outside. I'm not necessarily ready to develop mastodon code.

I started by trying this project for creating a mastodon instance in fly.io. https://github.com/tmm1/flyapp-mastodon

It wasn't working, so I tried to set this up in my local docker. Also no good. Then I went for the official mastodon repo. It's way more complicated and also doesn't work. 😩

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I am learning a lot about mastodon. It's just not the stuff I wanted to be learning about at this stage.

I'm confident that I can get something working. I'm actually pretty comfortable with most of the component parts of mastodon. rails, postgres, redis, node, etc. The complexity is in how they are all arranged and configured to work together.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

Broke the thread. Sorry.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/112487699237580667

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I think it's possible to demystify a lot of this stuff. I think it's also possible to achieve a simpler deployment for people who run single user instances. The challenge with running some kind of alternative, is that you probably want it to be "mastodon compatible". That's not a real concept yet. But I suspect it will be in the future. And that will require having a clear understanding of the mastodon flavor of ActivityPub behavior.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

Yes I'm aware of all of this. You're basically illustrating what I mean by "mastodon compatible". That concept is still nascent. Those who have tried to make something else that speaks mastodon are going to have limited success. That's because a) the behavior of mastodon is not fully documented, and b) the behavior of mastodon is still evolving pretty rapidly.
https://social.belkadan.com/@jrose/statuses/01HYHGPJWZMY4H032CY3QWDAY6

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

I have some ideas about what I want to do in the future. But this isn't about just finding something off the shelf that does what I want. Right now I'm trying to actually starting to learn about the ecosystem from a technical perspective.

I've done a lot of griping about mastodon and the fediverse so far. Some people get frustrated. It's easy to just claim that I don't know what I'm taking about. So I'm gonna fix that.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

And eventually I'm coming back to this. One of the goals of the fediverse should be to give people the control that they want. I realized pretty early on that the mastodon ecosystem isn't meeting that promise all that well today. No shade. It just is what it is.

There's more work to be done. And I may want to influence how things develop. So I need to be more informed.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/111927504927667540

thisismissem, to random
@thisismissem@hachyderm.io avatar

This might actually be a good AI usage?
https://wikimedia.social/@srishakatux/112486387689838025

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@thisismissem depends on how they're using "cutting edge AI technology". If they're asking the LLM to interpret things, that feels untrustworthy. It's not super clear how they're using it just from reading the description.

polotek,
@polotek@social.polotek.net avatar

@luis_in_brief @thisismissem @srishakatux yes this part. This is the part I would be highly skeptical of.

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