polotek

polotek, 10 hours ago

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

polotek, 10 hours ago

@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, 9 hours ago

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

polotek, 8 hours ago

@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, 11 hours ago

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, 11 hours ago

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, 11 hours ago

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, 10 hours ago

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

polotek, 10 hours ago

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, 10 hours ago

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, 10 hours ago

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, 10 hours ago

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

polotek, 13 hours ago

@thisismissem it might be a good usage if the thing didn't make shit up by design.

polotek, 12 hours ago

@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, 12 hours ago

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

polotek, 1 day ago

Just a reminder. I'm still exploring mastodon and the fediverse from a more technical perspective. I haven't quite gotten around to figuring out what "closed by default" looks like. But I still think it's a better use of time and energy than being mad when bad things happen on your completely open and unrestricted network. I'll share whatever I'm learning when I do get there.
https://social.polotek.net/@polotek/111932297792406262

polotek, 1 day ago

We're probably going to have to repeat this a lot and keep talking about it. But we don't actually have a ton of practice for how to manage things in a world without corporate control structures. Managing spam is one of the many things we take for granted now. Companies just do it for us, because not doing it devalues their business.

In the fediverse, all of these responsibilities are decentralized. It's going to matter a lot that nobody has to make themselves responsible for fighting spam.

polotek, 1 day ago

I know I sometimes start out by being snarky about these things. I can't help it. I am actually looking forward to seeing more discourse about all of the things we took for granted in corporatized social media. I believe we can figure out how to give ourselves those benefits again without the same compromises. But it takes work. And the first step is getting over that thing where wander through the world without caring about how these things actually get handled.

polotek, 1 day ago

My current feeling is that we need more parts of the ecosystem to be "pluggable". I should be able to pay for spam protection on my instance even if other people don't care enough or don't have the funds. But right now I'm not sure where it would plug in. I haven't noticed where the services I pay for even address it.
https://front-end.social/@ppk/112480843260215805

polotek, 1 day ago

I have a vivid memory of the first time I set up my own self-hosted blog. We still allowed people to freely post comments back then, before we realized that was a mistake 😂.

Anyway, I started getting spam pretty immediately. And I had to figure out what was available in terms of spam filtering and how to integrate it into my hacky project. It was really instructive. And it's one more thing I stopped taking for granted.

polotek, 20 hours ago

@indutny sorry to hear this. I'll help out.