We should not be optimising Mastodon so it can handle more people per server. We should be optimising Mastodon so it incentivises more serves with fewer people.
(And if you take that line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you arrive at the idea behind the Small Web: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/)
@aral I have to say - I have been very intrigued around starting a server of my own, but I don't really know what I'm getting in to. I'm not used to managing my own personal infra, servers etc. I've done so before when I was a lot younger - but have landed very much in the "these aren't the problems I want to spend time on"-camp.
Perhaps it's a mindset shift? Maybe I'll value that more and take the steps for myself, because I see the importance of small over big?
@pavsaund @aral I’ve gradually shifted into that camp as well. Spent years running my own Nextcloud server and got tired of all the tiny things that kept popping up. At the end I bought managed Nextcloud to be rid of them and one day realized: that’s what Dropbox has been all along.
I’m not saying Nextcloud should not exist because there’s Dropbox. My point is that running/owning alternatives to Big Tech should be as hassle free as using Big Tech itself.
@pavsaund @aral I think we should promote “hassle free Mastodon” experiences instead of “run your own server”. The latter screams “work I don’t want to do” at me.
The underlying implementation can stay the same. It’s a matter of packaging the thing, meaning: you tell customers that they pay for and create a Mastodon account but under water you spin up a new instance for them.
In this scenario you are creating personal servers for everybody without them knowing (because they don’t care).
@simeon @pavsaund You’ll get no argument on that from me ;) https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
(Apart from perhaps that we should also be looking at designs that aim to make doing what you describe as easy as possible. It’s much easier to set up a system that’s explicitly designed to serve one person than one that is designed to serve 1-100,000 people. The complexity involved is orders of magnitude less in the former.)
@simeon @pavsaund Thanks! A mastodon-instance-per-person would likely qualify but is unrealistic and would be both overkill. Mastodon’s architecture mirrors that of Big Tech. It’s a server capable of supporting one to several hundred thousand people on a single instance. That’s very different from a system designed to support just one person. The latter has orders of magnitude less complexity and requires similarly fewer resources.
@pavsaund The thing is, you shouldn’t have to know what you’re getting into in order to do it. The fact that you need all that technical knowledge to get started is a failing on our part as designers/developers. We’re working on fixing that but in order to do so we must design technology differently (so it can be owned and controlled by people themselves not by others for them).
In the interim, there are folks like @mastohost that make it easier to host the current alternatives :)