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Is there a Mastodon instance that's basically Instagram? I suppose all you'd need for a masto insta (mastogram?) would be different CSS to display toots on just those instances that want to do it, and people could still follow from other instances and see the default image display... Kinda best of both worlds, photo-heavy display if you want it, vanilla masto if you don't.

@jasonsteakums This is a cool sounding idea!

I wonder what those who know more about hosting these things might have to say re:the logistics around image file sizes?

@b_cavello @jasonsteakums I'm thinking you'd probably want to use something like S3 for image storage.

This is a really interesting question, actually. I've been looking at Mastodon as a final product—didn't occur to me to look at it as, I don't know, sort of like Wordpress for social networking.

And you could call it "Mammogram" because it's based on Mastodon which is KINDA SORTA LIKE A MAMMOTH

@csilverman @b_cavello I love the "WordPress for social networking" way of looking at it! Actually, there are a lot of former Vine users out there who might jump at a good platform that picks up where it left off, and most of the pieces are in place with Mastodon...

@jasonsteakums @b_cavello heh. I mean, there's literally BuddyPress, but somehow that never really took off.

I don't know. I feel like when you're dealing with media—images, video—that increases complexity by orders of magnitude, since you have to deal with a lot more data. I doubt Mastodon has been designed to handle that, beyond embedding the occasional image.

But I'm a technical dunce who hasn't even set up a Mastodon instance yet so what do I know.

@csilverman @b_cavello I wonder if you could piggyback off of more robust services and just have Mastodon display media that's linked from elsewhere instead of uploaded to the instance? You could run into security concerns but maybe that's a more easily solved problem than a hosting nightmare.

@csilverman

@jasonsteakums @b_cavello I could see it. If Mastodon forked into a general-purpose toolkit for DIY social networking, one option might be storing media via S3, Google Cloud, etc. Sure, you're delegating part of your service to something you don't control 100%, but it might be worth it.

Honestly, right now I trust my web host over the admins of my main Mastodon instance. Nothing personal, I just know that company better than some random person on the net.

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