Single-user Mastodon Instance is a Bad Idea
Single-user Mastodon Instance is a Bad Idea
If you're thinking about setting up your own single-user Mastodon instance, I urge you not to do it. The user experience is so broken that it's baffling that anyone would find it acceptable.
As someone who's had a single-user Mastodon instance for two years now: I love it. It's definitely not for everyone, for reasons mainly stated in the article. However, if you like a more personal, highly-curated federated timeline, a single-user instance is great.
I 90% use Mastodon to keep up with my friends' posts and see art and animal pictures (and I hate interacting with strangers LOL), so I curate my instance to only subscribe to them. For the remaining 10%, I have a secondary account on a larger instance for when I want to read the news etc. It's worked well for me, but again, it's surely not for everyone!
Honest question : Why Mastodon ? I had a single-user instance very soon after discovering the fediverse, but the needed stack to run a Mastodon instance is really insane compared to something like Akkoma / Iceshrimp. I would never use Mastodon for a low number of users, including all the limitations compared to other micro-blogging activitypub compatible services.
There's also GoToSocial which is made to be lightweight from the get go.
Yea, as far as I've gathered, Akkoma is the way to go for single-user instances. Cleaner and more efficient platform with flexibility in the front end (and, IIRC, reply retrievals?)
Does this allow you to do a full text search of all posts on all instances that you federate with?
I hate interacting with strangers
I would reply but that would be awkwarddd. Hey, wait - PAPAYA? Is that YOU?! :p
I agree with this take, and recently I actually read this article that criticizes how server centric fedi is as a whole. If it's hard and expensive for a layperson to self host, but you need to have an account associated with a specific server, then you're going to end up with a system where you're under the whims of a instance owner still. Not to mention the whole pick a server step severely hurts our adoption rates.
I like the idea of having an account just being a public and private key pair. Theoretically you could make one client side, use it to sign your messages, and servers could verify the signature and distribute your post without needing to have an explicit account for you. You could send every message to a random instance and it'd still work. You wouldn't have to worry about links to the "wrong instance" and you wouldn't have to attach your identity to a instance that might shut down or be bought by a bad person. The server would be essentially irrelevant.
I align with that article 's conclusion; in fact such a "fediverse browser" is exactly what I think the fediverse needs to fully replace closed/proprietary/traditional social media.
However, some of their arguments seem off. For example, for the client to be able to choose/implement it's own sorting algorithm, it seems to me that it would need to have access to all posts. At that point, your client is just another server, with all the problems that we're originally trying to avoid.
I have the same problem with your proposal / nostr's approach: you may obtain a portable identity but all the "content" tied to that identity still has to live somewhere - someone else's server or your own.
Yeah, I disagree with that part as well. I think it's fine for servers to store the content and provide endpoints for specific queries/sorts, and expecting the clients to have all the posts is a tad extreme.
In this case, yes the data needs to live somewhere, but that's the nature of having data be retrievable.
You realize you're describing Nostr right?
Nostr does some interesting things! What I mentioned here is actually just the identity part of what I think could be a significantly improved version of the fediverse. I have ideas on how to support subreddit style communities and decentralized moderation and things like that that make the whole idea a bit different from nostr.
The only complaint on this list that, I think, is a legitimate complaint is replies not loading. Imagine if Lemmy worked that way. The rest is just how it's intended to work.
Certainly a good warning before trying to self host but this isn't broken.
IIRC that's down to mastodon's implementation of outboxes being broken.
With a small amount of effort and the use of https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher and https://github.com/g3rv4/GetMoarFediverse you can mitigate basically all those issues. It's still not perfect by any means but it results in a perfectly usable single user instance.
The first populates the replies of the home timeline posts you see (as well as profiles of people it finds in those replies) and the second pulls down all the content from instances you select for your followed hashtags (choose mastodon.social and you can guarantee you'll see most all posts with those tags)
I works much better with Akkoma, but yes there are certain down-sides to single-user instances.
You mean you'll only see content from people you follow and only people who follow you will see you content? Sounds like working as intended the way things were meant to be.
Interesting to note that this was originally posted a little over a year ago. I don't know if anything has changed since, as I don't self host masto and have been spending more and more of my "fedi-time" here in lemmy.
Not surprised that someone who "led AI and subscription products at Amazon for the past 8 years" ended up back on mastodon.social, but that's probably neither here nor there...
@cypherpunks I've got the feeling as if the author doesn't know about the existence of relay servers. With them, also a single user instance works really fine, I think.
He does mention it but says it added resource overhead he didn't want
It can also be an awesome idea, depending on your perspective. Having an instance without all the cruft is a pristine peaceful thing at times. For a while I ran one of those subscriber bots on Lemmy and pretty quickly found it to be so full of shitposting spam as to be unusable. Just don't start an instance and expect it to be a raging party and you won't find it disappointing.
Just uses Akkoma or GoToSocial, setup fedifetcher or follow some relays and you can get good enough experience in Fediverse. Mastodon is literally build to handle huge amount of users so it is nowhere near efficient if used for just 1 person.