If you want to keep up with trending topics, find news outlets you believe provide you the proper coverage of what you’re after, and just follow the RSS feeds instead.
Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are there for people to post hot takes on the news, not just share the news. RSS is the way to go if the news is what you’re after, and not people commenting on the news.
Eh, I wouldn’t go about ‘the self-hosted admins didn’t do anything!’. There never really was a time when the majority (or even a meaningiful minority) of users hosted their own email.
In the beginning, you got your email address from your school or your ISP, and it changed whenever you left/changed providers, so the initial “free” email came from the likes of Hotmail (which rapidly became Microsoft), Yahoo (which was uh, Yahoo), and offerings from the big ISPs of the era, like AOL and whatnot.
You still had school and ISP email, but it just rapidly fell out of fashion because your Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL email never changed regardless of what ISP you used or whatever, so it was legitimately a better solution.
And then Google came along with Gmail and it was so much better than every other offering that they effectively ate the whole damn market by default because all the people who were providing the free webmail at that time didn’t do a damn thing to improve until after Google had already “won”.
So if you want to be mad, this is firmly Microsoft and Yahoo’s fault for being lazy fucks.
Keep in mind that you’re going to be retrieving and storing a huge amount of data running these scripts, and you should expect to need more than a $5 1gb of RAM vps to do it without it being a shitty broken experience for you.
We’re talking dozens of gigabytes of storage for the database, plus effectively a need for an infinite amount of storage for the image caching, plus enough RAM and CPU resources to effectively process the whole Threadiverse.
Anything on the public internet is some amount of risk.
It sounds reasonably configured, and for a single service that’s been fairly robust, the only thing you really should make sure you’re doing is updates - better if you configure automatic updates, so you don’t even have to think about it.
unattended-upgrades is what you’d want on a Debian-alike for updates, and Overseerr depends on how you installed it.
They’re not wrong in that most people aren’t suited to or should be running what is effectively public services for other people from some surplus Dell R410 they found on eBay for $40.
That said, it’s all a matter of degree: I don’t host critical infra for people (password managers, file sharing, etc.) where the data loss is catastrophic, but more things that if it explodes for an afternoon, everyone can just deal with it. I absolutely do not want to be The Guy who lost important data through an oversight on an upgrade or just plain bad luck.
But, on the other hand, the SLA on my Plex server is ‘if it works, cool, if not I’ll fix it when I can’ and that’s been wildly popular I haven’t had any real issues, because my friends and family aren’t utter dicks about it and overly entitled, but YMMV.
TL;DR: self-hosting for others is fine, as long as the other people understand that it’s not always going to be incredibly reliable, and you don’t ever present something that puts them at risk of catastrophic loss, unless you’ve got actual experience in providing those service and can do proper backups, HA, and are willing to sacrifice your Friday evening for no money.
The only comment I’d add here is that you should make sure you have a real domain, that you’ve paid actual money to, when setting this up. ActivityPub assumes the domain is immutable, and the free dynamic domain names you can get (or free TLDs like, say, .ml was) are a bad choice. Spend the $10 or whatever, because if something happens to your domain name, you cannot just update it in the database and fix federation: it completely breaks everything in a way that’s not repairable.
And that’s why corporate social media is so sticky: your average user doesn’t care WHAT is done to them and the most they’ll maybe do is grumble slightly and spend a little less money, but won’t actually bother to do anything or make any changes, or go somewhere else.
Talk to your instance admin for that. Mastodon caches remote images and serves it from the local server to local users, so it should be fast unless the admin has something broken or configured wrong.
UptimeKuma is what I use; it’ll watch tcp connections, docker containers, websites… whatever. And the notifications are pretty comprehensive and probably cover anything in 2023 would want to be using.
Just to be pedantic, it’s not pull, it’s push: the data is POSTed from the server that hosts the community.
Right now loading a page makes a bunch of API queries to pull all the related data for the posts, votes, sidebar info, and so on AND the API is very untuned and sending way more data than the WebUI/a client needs to actually generate a page: hence my ‘it’s less efficient’ comment, though this is certainly something that can be tweaked to improve performance between the back and frontends.
I will, however, admit that this is only true if someone is actually reading the content they’re subscribed to. The ‘subscribe to everything’ scripts turn this math on its head because now you are using resources to gather data you don’t care about.
ActivityPub isn’t anything more than JSON over HTTP(s); there’s no reason at all that you couldn’t simply tunnel all the traffic using hidden services over Tor using nothing more than the Tor daemon to create a hidden service and the proxy functionality to route all outbound HTTP traffic over Tor.
ActivityPub is not a distributed network: you don’t have communications between servers in a mesh, the server that owns a community(ex. fediverse@lemmy.world) pushes out JSON data to any subscribers.
Small servers won’t talk directly to each other, unless they’re subscribed to communities on each other so having a lot of small servers doesn’t actively impact the load on each other, but only on the larger servers that have the more active communities.
And, even then, the JSON requests are going to be a lower impact than a user actively browsing the site, though probably only marginally and maybe not in all cases.
I love the Silicon Valley techbros lately. Their sales pitches have gone from ‘we have this cool new thing’ to ‘we’ve created something that solves the problems you didn’t have until we created the problem you’re now dealing with!’.
Much shareholder value or something, I guess.
I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don’t want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you’re allowed to use the platform.
There’s issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.
And, that’s okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.
But, at the same time, you shouldn’t be utterly confused why so many people either don’t want to or bounce right off your platform and aren’t sticky when it’s pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.
That’s fair; I wasn’t really considering how poorly performing PSUs were at extremely low loads, despite knowing that they are.
Odd that a random brick would be substantially better than a same-era actual PSU, but I suppose it’s hard to say without more specifics.
Agree with this comment: Firefish is much better than the current state of Mastodon, especially since all the complaints you have are basically being wont-fixed by the current dev team.
The T variant is the low-power, lower clocked (3.2ghz vs 2.5ghz) almost half the TDP (65w vs 35w) variant; kinda the whole point is it’s going to use less power.
The answer for your question is ‘no’.
You’re never going to reduce power usage substantially by swapping PSUs, because there’s just not enough efficiency gains to be had even if a Pico PSU was more efficient which they really aren’t.
You say the hardware is ‘nothing too different’ but you mention ddr4 vs 3, which makes me think the Dell is a generation or few older which could easily impact power draw by 10w.
Technically you’re correct: your VPS provider can inspect your network traffic, the contents of RAM and anything on the disk.
Bluntly: you have to trust your VPS provider, and if you’re unsure they’re trustworthy you shouldn’t use them.
(Scaleway is legitimate, bound by actual useful data protection laws, and has a comprehensive privacy and security policy.)
He looks like he’s either going to tell the cops they’re so fired, or he’s shit himself.