Gregory's ServerI 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
 @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. @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. @Meyerweb "How to Run Your Own Mail Server": https://io.mwl.io/@mwl/112757680253050155  @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.  @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  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.
  @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 @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. |
@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.)