There is something which scares me on mastodon. I see more and more people installing instances while they don't have a clue about what they're doing.
Then their instance is going to be listed on the website and people will be randomly redirected toward them when someone wants to use mastodon.
But then what happen?
Hosting someone's services is not fun or anything. It's a liability and I hope you have that in mind.
Also, pick carefully your instance.
@kodo and what will happen in one month when the hype is not there anymore and the admin gets bored? :)
@Vigdis we shall see. heh
@Vigdis Don't be scared.
It will be alright in the end.
@Vigdis If you don't know what you're doing but want to, then run your own server. Then all you can break is your own account.
@artemist I definitely hope people will do that!
@Vigdis Well, I agree mostly, but same thing people were saying when web server became affordable to the public. And by the the way, hosting a service and doing that real good is big big fun for me and I guess many admins see it that way ;-) Also, right, be careful when choosing an instance or offer your instance to the public
@Vigdis I am hoping (and developer intend has been explicitly stated) that we get semver and patching sorted, so these sorts of "blind" instance lists will weight patched versions very highly vs those that languish nd become potential threats.
@Vigdis the step in the prod guide where you edit .env.production makes it easy to tell how to run single-user mode. i hope most people are doing that instead of falling backwards into community management
@ryan I hope too, but I'm scared that some people may think "hey all the cool kids run their own instance, let's do that and try to have as many tooters as possible".
Maybe hosting mastondon should require a license! :D
@Vigdis How much could there to be to know about running rails and nodejs inside a docker container on a VPS, with a high velocity codebase running production, and an immediate userbase to whom you offer no redundancy and which will expect 24/7 uptime? This is pure alarmism!
@frankiesaxx @Vigdis there were rhetorical flourishes. I think it's accurate in spirit.
@Vigdis @chaotic_signals Indeed - sysadmin is serious work. If instances are fairly small, then the potential for harm is fairly limited, but there's some big ones out there that may need a bit of...counseling about how to effectively go about sysadmin and community admin work.
@munin @Vigdis @chaotic_signals Yep. And with system administration, the hardest part is, as in most relationships, knowing when and how to stop if it's not bringing you any positive feelings.
The tooling/software needs to make user migration across instances possible before too many people hit that point.
@Vigdis nothing lasts forever. If people approach new adventures -- like this one -- as ephemeral, it will be alright. 😊
@david I don't want mastodon to be ephemeral :(
Don't you like to toot?!
@Vigdis I wouldn't be here if I didn't like interacting, of course I do. Yet, I am aware that instances will come and go, just like the real Mastodon did. It is the nature of the beast!
@david haha made me chuckle
@Vigdis accept the impermanence of the internet
@Vigdis I've been thinking about this as well. Lots of instances, how long before one or two of them are put up by bad actors with an agenda. Not everyone is savvy enough to have different passwords for different accounts, and this seems like the perfect opportunity for some social engineering. While I think the community will respond quickly as it matures, this is a bit of the wild wild west right now.
@Vigdis definitely my concern as well. I'm planning to spin up my own instance if this thing lasts longer than a month so that I don't depend on anyone but myself. Plus, if I wait a month to start mine I hopefully won't see massive usage like every other instance.
@CrowderSoup yes but until then, you'll accumulated things (followers, toots and so on) on this account and I'm not sure you'll ever be able to migrate them completely
you can export and then reimport stuffs but it's pretty basic for now
@Vigdis might give me the motivation to roll up my sleeves and submit some PRs, 😂
@CrowderSoup Please do! :)
@Vigdis Is the default open or close to the inscriptions ?
@Vigdis this is why it should be truly peer to peer and not whatever this weirdness is
@Vigdis well, on the instance lists ive seen so far they usually rank them by metrics that are good indicators of their sustainability so there's that