Comment by yogthos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yogthos | Hacker News Reader

I definitely agree that federation is the right approach for moving forward. This is how the internet was meant to work in the first place.

One huge advantage of ActivityPub based federation is that every service that uses it can talk to any other service. So, you can share data between Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, Plume, and any other federated platforms. This also allows different competing services in the same space such as Mastodon and Pleroma to work with each other. Meanwhile, traditional commercial platforms like Fb, Twitter, and Youtube have zero incentive to allow users to move data between them.

While I agree that it would be great if people could just host via their ISP, VPS hosting has gotten both a lot easier and cheaper nowadays. You can get a Digital Ocean server for 5 bucks a month, and thanks to containers it's much easier to package and distribute the services. VPS providers will also often have cheap backup options. This dramatically lowers the barrier for managing a service.

I understand VPS are cheap now but they are not free like in case of centralized services. Hosting costs are same everywhere. I think developers from developing nations would still prefer a home based solution over a VPS because its consuming (INR 3600/year in India) out of there pockets. General population won't even think of self hosting because centralized services are "free" both in affordability and setup. Very few give a damn about privacy. Cost is a factor that definitely affects self hosting when you think about developing nations.

Another thing is data, in case of self hosting at home, you are always in control of your data. Your data never leaves your home. Unless you explicitly want it to. In case of VPS, data is out there on someone else's infra. Backups are most probably not free. So yes both sides have their own pros and cons.

For sure, I think it would be fantastic if people could just host their own sites from home. I'm just noting that the barrier to hosting is dramatically lower today than even a decade ago. So, self hosted sites are becoming viable option again, and hopefully that will lead to more decentralization.

Another major obstacle is the limited scope of a lot of these projects. Each project, excepts the microblogs, focus on a single media type and ignore others. So you still have to have multiple semi-siloed accounts to participate with various parts of the fediverse. As a pixelfed user, you can't interact with plume/write.as users or vice-versa. It's cool that I can follow all of these users from my Pleroma (or microblog.pub/mastodon) account, but they can't interact with me. It's only one way interaction.

Pixelfed has incomplete federation support FYI

Even when it's completed, it will never support incoming Notes/Articles/Any other AP type.

Hrm? Its Open Source, anyone could fork it and add support (like the Florence fork of Mastodon) and Dansup would probably give a PR with said support a fair shake. I'd love to use the Pixelfed interface to browse Sinblr/Humblr posts.

Yes, it's open source and the possibility is there, but it's not likely. There isn't any Florence instance yet. The other masto forks are all relatively close to mainline and aren't drastically different.

Dansup has said he doesn't want to support other AP types. It's not about who writes the patch. He wants pixelfed to be an image sharing service, akin to Instagram.

> There isn't any Florence instance yet

My server admin moved us to Florence a while back, there are more than a few in production right now. Not really sure what your on about...

> Dansup has said he doesn't want to support other AP types.

Dansup says many things, the proof is in the pudding though. When there is public discontent he tends to change his tune fairly quick, based on his history back on Hyperboria.

Cheapest VM on Hetzner has 20TB monthly traffic and costs only 2.9 euro.

And it works beautifully, I can certainly recommend it for things like this.

Well, I self-host, but the main barrier I have against providing those services for others is availability: I am unable to guarantee 100% uptime.

Federation is a great thing, as it distributes uptime over the network. Then comes peer-to-peer (see peertube) to make peak load easier to bear. But we would need a few easy ways to poll resources of a few self-hosting devices to provide high availability. This probably means a completely decentralized protocol, or techniques such as hosting DNS on the same machine as the service, in multiple place, since it looks like the Internet was designed with a federated architecture in mind, not a distributed one.

It would not be unreasonable to use a cheap object store (Backblaze B2) as a host of last resort. This would of course have a cost, but there's always a cost somewhere.

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