I am thinking about hosting my own Mastodon server from home on a Raspberry Pi (Pi4 8GB)?

  1. Are there good tutorials out there?
  2. What’s the annual cost just to host yourself?

@linux @nixCraft @raspberrypi

  • renard_roux@beehaw.org
    4·
    9 months ago

    I tried reading up on Nostr the other day, and came away finding it unpalatable, mainly because my understanding was that upvotes are tied to crypto.

    The way I read it, you need some sort of crypto currency to pay for upvoting a post, from which I inferred that the only reasonable gauge for a posts popularity (upvotes) was intrinsically tied to money (and crypto-money, at that).

    Is this a reasonable assessment, or did I misunderstand something?

    EDIT: I was wrong, and stand corrected 👍

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      Your understanding is not correct. You do not need to use crypto at all to use the platform. There is an optional tipping mechanism where you can tip people via BTC lightning if you like their tweets. It’s pretty fun to use, it’s fun to receive tips from others when they like your post. But you don’t have to.

      You can still post, like, re-tweet, reply, DM, etc with no crypto whatsoever. Crypto is not tied to upvotes/visibility unless you specifically set it to filter that way in your client.

      One benefit of having crypto integration built-in is that it can provide a sustainable funding mechanisms for relays. You can use “pools” when you send tips. So when you send 10c in a tip for somebody’s post, you can elect to have 1% go to the relay maintainer, nostr development, or any other destination you choose. This problem of subsidizing hosting is a problem ActivityPub doesn’t has any real solution for.

      On Activity Pub, instances may choose to run ads, issue badges, or otherwise pay for hosting, but if AP is going to scale to the level it needs to get to, we can’t rely on the altruism of instances to just host everything for free. If we do, we will end up in a centralized social media mess like we’re trying to get away from in the first place.

      There are many ways to solve this problem of needing to pay for the network infrastructure, but nostr is the only one currently that has a workable solution.

      • renard_roux@beehaw.org
        3·
        9 months ago

        Thank you for the clarification! I’ve clearly misunderstood the function of the crypto and/or read a poor description of Nostr 👌

        In this case, the crypto (in itself still an unpalatable, energy wasting pyramid scheme, IMO) makes a lot more sense, and doesn’t detract from the platform (other than facilitating the platform’s tacit promotion of crypto).

        • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          Nice to have a cordial discussion/disagreement on here. If you’re interested in reading some (IMO) good arguments for why it’s not a energy wasting pyramid scheme, check my comment history :).