#privacy_concerns — Public Fediverse posts

@marathon Well, being a long time provider of hosting services myself, I don’t really know all that much about mastodon hosting solutions, other than #MastoHost was the traditional and defacto go-to, perhaps the only #SaaS solution, for a long time.

Here’s the #Wildebeest source, which I suppose anyone could conceivably self-host with some non-trivial measure of tweaking.

https://github.com/cloudflare/wildebeest

I would venture to guess that #Cloudflare will remain the only SaaS provider for hosting it, but who knows?

One of the big differences between the two, right out of the gate, is that Wildebeest is built almost entirely upon #TypeScript, and uses an #SQLite derived database they call D1, which they say is in alpha stage right now, so it’s bound to be much lighter (and faster) than mastodon which is a hodgepodge of Ruby, Node, and Redis for cache (keeping it somewhat performant). The mastodon database engine is #PostGreSQL, which is a solid choice. One of mastodons criticisms is synchronous updates causing lags when say, it’s been offline for a while and needs to catch-up.

Again, I’m prejudiced, especially considering that I had to maintain mastodon through all the vulnerabilities and updates, tweaking it so it could actually be used for longer posts for actual articles, tutorials, HowTo’s, even recipes for chefs and the like, but to be fair, it does come into it’s own as far as being a viable platform at the ≥ 20,000 active user account level…

But that flies in the face of what #DeSoc and the #Fediverse are about - non-monolithic, horizontal scaling of single user and small community based instances (aka “SmallWeb” deployments).

I ran my own open mastodon server for a couple of years and couldn’t wait to get everyone off of it and eventually deploy a Pleroma (v1.0.0) server instead.

Gled had perhaps the most popular mastodon forks and operated a very popular instance based on his fork, with all kinds of features that just made sense while mastodon continued to fall further and further behind everyone else, but eventually he abandoned that and as you can see, urged others to deploy Pleroma servers instead:

https://github.com/gled-rs/mastodo

While mastodon is under a #Copyleft license, Wildebeest is Apache v2 licensed: https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

So, no pun intended, but it’s a completely different beast than mastodon. Cloudflare will undoubtedly attract many code contributors, and it will be interesting to see its evolution, which the company states they will accept input on from the community and consider - that’s more than Eugen, as the presumed BDFL of mastodon, has demonstrated historically, where many of the most popular feature requests have gone repeatedly ignored or outright categorically dismissed; leading to some very fine forks of the platform such as #Hometown and others - still, they are forks of mastodon do adoptees aren’t escaping any of the (“excessive”, IMO) system requirements and overhead issues that do many former mastodon self-hosters have cited as reasons for their departure from the platform.

Aside from that, Cloudflare really wants this to be a Cloudflare based platform, and that’s really what the crux of the biscuit will continue to be with regards to most criticisms.

I don’t know if I sufficiently addressed your question though. I hope I at least came close. In any case, there are a lot of Fediverse server platforms available that are lightweight enough to run on small IoT devices like Raspberry Pi and old PCs or laptops collecting dust in garages that can easily be deployed, and have features that literally leave mastodon behind in the dust.

One more anecdotal point before leaving the whole notion of, “is Cloudflare evil?” question that I’ve been skirting here. the mastodon company itself, to get over the doggedness of its vertical #silo’ing strategy, places the servers that it owns behind a Cloudflare competitor - https://www.chinafy.com/technology/fastly-china - you might be interested in looking at that.

Here’s an article I recently published about one such example of an up and coming platform based on #Django that is now in beta:

https://tallship.writeas.com/takahe-a-new-fediverse-paradigm

I hope that helps!

#tallship #ActivityPub #Takahe (Takahē) #D1 #Privacy_concerns #CDN #vendor_lock_in #Sunnyvale_Syndrome

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