> I wanted to check out Mastodon and looked into setting up a node. It's a nightmare of rube goldberg machine dependency hell. It's not that I can't, but that I don't have time to mess with it.
I've come to the conclusion lately that the thing holding decentralization back the most is that sunning any kind of server-side code is challenging to set up and a regular pain in the neck to maintain.
This prevents even tech-savvy people from setting up their own nodes of whatever cool tech happens to come out (not just social networks, but RSS readers, bookmarking apps, you name it: there is an OSS thing out there that fits your needs but is a PIA to install and run.)
And in turn this limits the number of nodes that will ever run on a decentralized service, and nodes will constantly go offline as admins get fed up with running them. We need the ability to install and run server software as easily (almost) as we can install something on our phones.
Maybe a layer on top of Ubuntu Server, with a baked in web UI so that any Joe can get a DO droplet and start serving.
Much like many projects on github have a "deploy to heroku" perhaps Linode or DO could make deploying a Mastodon instance as simple. There would need to be a good admin panel UI, as you said (manage federation links, users, blacklists/whitelists). It could even be free for the 1st month. If there is demand, my guess is these services will emerge.
I was a backer when it came out but it has not become what I had hoped it would be.
It seems the need to alter the applications to work as a sandstorm app means most apps were a few versions behind and often contained bugs. I tried doing some of the simplest things and got major fails, so I let it go.
Plus it didn't handle the web-centric use case well (only static content [0]), which makes its usefulness very limited as a server-side platform.
I've come to the conclusion lately that the thing holding decentralization back the most is that sunning any kind of server-side code is challenging to set up and a regular pain in the neck to maintain.
This prevents even tech-savvy people from setting up their own nodes of whatever cool tech happens to come out (not just social networks, but RSS readers, bookmarking apps, you name it: there is an OSS thing out there that fits your needs but is a PIA to install and run.)
And in turn this limits the number of nodes that will ever run on a decentralized service, and nodes will constantly go offline as admins get fed up with running them. We need the ability to install and run server software as easily (almost) as we can install something on our phones.
Maybe a layer on top of Ubuntu Server, with a baked in web UI so that any Joe can get a DO droplet and start serving.