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Eric A. Meyer

I just saw someone characterize running a Mastodon instance as being “no harder than running your own mail server” and I thought “oof, that’s a savage takedown” before grasping that they meant it as a positive.

36 comments
Simon St.Laurent

@Meyerweb I'm pondering Pleroma in the hopes that it will be no more difficult than a web server... (I still run my own mail server, though it gets harder and harder.)

Steven 🎃

@simonstl @Meyerweb If you're looking for easy to manage single-user software, GoToSocial through Docker is absolutely fantastic.

It's what got me to finally learn how to use Docker.

David Collantes 🪷

@steven @simonstl @Meyerweb 100% GtS hands down. A single binary, a templates directory, and a configuration file. Can have it running in 15 minutes (and that includes DNS entries!).

Steven 🎃

@david @simonstl @Meyerweb And using SQLite means if anything does break, you can fix it with very minimal knowledge.

Pete Gamache

@simonstl @Meyerweb in my case it’s Akkoma (a Pleroma fork) but I recommend you get your log rotation game in shape earlier than later. Lots of waking up to a full filesystem…

Eric Likness

@Meyerweb Mr. Meyer this observation wins the Internet today, hands down. 🏆

חנן כהן • Hanan Cohen

@Meyerweb running your own mail server is easy. making your mail reach the recepients is hard to impossible. running your own Mastodon server is probably easier than that.

Τοπάζ Αλαιν Φογτια Αννα Εμιλια

@hananc @Meyerweb I think then the stakes for the own Mastodon server should also be upped. Running your own Mastodon server for not just a single person or close friend group without getting defederated from too many other instances is doable, but non-trivial. (with the advantage that people on small instances usually don't randomly spam stuff) Not getting overrun with spam from other instances (especially big ones) is harder.

Шуро
Actually it is a very good comparison.
Phil Haigh

@Meyerweb I once investigated running my own mail server. Happily ran a group of VMs, configured the firewalls, ran databases and Tomcat instances, tuned everything.

Mail server? Nooooooo. Not until I found a canned offering that ran on top of OSX and made things super, super easy.

Afferand

@Meyerweb
It's easy to run a mail server. Until you do it.

MakerGeek

@Afferand @Meyerweb haha yeah, running one is easy. Getting your mail delivered anywhere... That's a different story.

ɗ𐐩ʃƕρʋ

@Meyerweb [flashbacks of postfix config files] oh dear

Lorgo Numputz

@deshipu @Meyerweb postfix?

LUXURY!

(having sendmail config flashbacks now...)

Ben Cox

@Meyerweb No harder than IMAP? Sure.

SMTP? I wouldn't run one of those if you paid me.

Ampelios

@ben @Meyerweb Not with Gates's d* and Bezos pushing.

xconde

@Meyerweb running postfix? Weak maybe. Running sendmail? No way ever.

Traumatised for life by m4 macros.

Solarbird :flag_cascadia:

@xconde @Meyerweb somewhere I probably still have a copy of the pre-compiler sendmail.cf I made to do least-cost name-, host-, and transport-based routing.

i may even also have the tools I wrote to manage it, which was... kind of like a sendmail compiler before there were sendmail compilers. xD

sendmail is terrifying and hilarious and i still run it out of spite

xconde

@moira maybe it's because I never learnt how m4 macros work, but I think people like you are wizards.

Solarbird :flag_cascadia:

@xconde it absolutely _does not_ stay in your brain. it would take me a while to get back up to speed if I had to do it again and thank fuck it's not the kind of thing i have to do anymore.

we had three different transport layers all with very different and variable costs and speeds and a hostile admin on the far side of the most important uplink. it was nightmare adventures _every day_ and I do _not_ miss it.

but that was a sendmail.cf that both made it work and made the beardiest of neckbeards cry, and yeah. still proud of that part.

@xconde it absolutely _does not_ stay in your brain. it would take me a while to get back up to speed if I had to do it again and thank fuck it's not the kind of thing i have to do anymore.

we had three different transport layers all with very different and variable costs and speeds and a hostile admin on the far side of the most important uplink. it was nightmare adventures _every day_ and I do _not_ miss it.

obidijohn

@Meyerweb the app is the best hop i start getting more follows

Iron Bug
well, normal mail server eats multitudes of times less resources than Mastodon. mail server can run on a little hardware box with weak CPU and tiny RAM amount.
sleepy

@Meyerweb @jwz as someone who does both, complicated in different ways, but honestly once both are set up it’s pretty much autopilot for upgrades.

Phil

@Meyerweb So what you’re saying is I should run my own mastodon server as I already have the requisite masochistic tendencies?

Nini

@Meyerweb I barely ran a Geocities site, I've no chance with a mail server.

Irina

@Meyerweb We ran our own mail server for twenty years. No way am I going to try to run a Mastodon instance.

nadja

@Meyerweb it's as easy in that running a mastodon server badly is easy and so is running a mail server badly?

Matt Maddux

@Meyerweb When was the last time this person hosted their own mail server, 2002?

Julien Silland

@Meyerweb lovely how ~30% of the replies are about how running an email server is actually not that hard, unless you want it to work

Mikael Hansson

@Meyerweb Looking at the negative replies I wonder what the big issue is. You shouldn’t be careless while originally setting up a mail server, but once properly configured, receiving and sending email just works. Now if you want to do things that look a lot like spamming, that’s a different question, but for personal or regular business use? No problem at all. I don’t have an opinion on running a Mastodon instance as I don’t do that.

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