Notices by stuart (stuart@social.brainsys.com)

@MediaActivist

That's unfair - Classic Coke v Pepsi Lite ;-)

@TJ1001 @DigitalTaoist

Littlejohn never did bridge-building. This week those were all shot away condemning both into camps where the most aggressive appear to hold sway. Until both sides accept there is no final solution there can be no final solution which is an eventual reconciliation or at least acceptance of co-existance.

Nieve I know but Northern Ireland and South Africa found a way to achieve the impossible in my lifetime. Imperfect I know but perfection is the enemy of good.

@arinbasu1 @Tony @Bloomfer @maegul I run a small instance as @admin. Running your own independent server or vps does require basic SysAdmin skills (and mindset). People who do will almost certainly have a domain or three so adding on a 'social' subdomain and point it at the server is trivial and free.

Reducing that to an app is imho a pipedream. More promising is a hoster offering a managed vps with Mastodon or whatever as a service. Taking responsibility for backups and managing data storage.

@arinbasu1 @Tony @Bloomfer @maegul @admin Adding to this even experienced SysAdmins who celebrated getting their Mastodon instance running (not without incident) suddenly hit the harder problem of getting it to federate successfully. Six months on I'm only just succeeding - yesterday we only hit 50% of known instances. This required extra software.

Running your own instance is great and rewarding. But be careful of building unrealistic expectations, fragile servers and disappointing results.

@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 Certainly not. I'm advocating against monolithic instances. I'm thinking along the choices non-IT people have with, say, WordPress. A multiplicity of hosters offering managed solutions including a domain or sub-domain.

People who have a #RaspberryPi and a decent broadband connection, on the other hand, also have scripts and videos to get them going. Great for a personal instance. Most will have the required skills (or the #RPi will still be in the drawer ;-)

@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 That's a reducing issue these days as IPv6 becomes more prevalent as it is (with the UK providers I've worked with) effectively gives a fixed large range. You need to use Cloudflare or other CDM to proxy it for IPv4 users but that's free for small instances.

More to the point Mastodon is reportably difficult to install without a IPv4 connection. But that should be fixable by the developers. Hopefully soon.

@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 Anybody who can spin up an Apache/Nginx instance can proxy it for you. Opposite of centralisation which is the whole point of being here.

'Free' tiers of commercial providers tend to go non-free over time. Hence use 'em when free but build an independent alternative. for later

Do we need for some sort of Trade Union for us little instances - to challenge any decisions the majors might make that effectively isolates or makes second class netcitizens of us?

@Bloomfer @Tony @maegul @arinbasu1 Have to differ with you as a veteran of this war which was won by the little people against the megacorps and a corrupt management only two years ago: https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/15/nominet_second_agm/

The major beneficiary was not us but the public.

We hopefully, will never get into the same position with Mastodon/ActivityPub but always be prepared. I need smarter guys than me to be watching, advising and, if necessary, warning.

@GottaLaff

I'm guessing they won't ban access to Twitter. There are simply too any reasons, like it's an important info outlet for so many EU organisations.

What they are more likely do is to fine and/or ban EU advertisers from using the platform.