Hrmm due to filling up my database allocation I have had to increase my Masto

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@bloor @wishy @dtl

fair. Easiest way to think of it is a small prebuilt vm image but without a kernel and (usually) designed to run a single app.

Running a docker container is generally easy, but troubleshooting docker issues can be a pain (though rarely needed IME), so I guess a native install might end up being less burden if you're not already doing that anyway

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@neil @ben @wishy @dtl thank you, I may very well take you up on that, I think I need to try and get my “basic requirements” in order first though, perhaps a machine or a virtual machine, nice and clean and ready

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@ben @wishy @dtl why not just use a VM?

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@bloor @ben @wishy @dtl

Sure!

Personally, I am not using a VM, although there may be some value to that. I dedicated the whole machine to Mastodon, but then I, erm, use it rather a lot!

So just a normal Debian installation for me.

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@bloor @wishy @dtl The answer to that depends a bit on exact needs, but

Scalability - I can run far more containers than I can VMs because containers don't usually bring userspace and kernel overhead

Ease of deployment: containers ship with all their deps in there, so there's no screwing about with dep hell (or incompatible deps being required by different apps). That also makes support easier if you're shipping

upgrades are also much easier - you just change the tag and pull the new image.

[wishy@tooter.wishy.co.uk]

@steve @bloor @ben @dtl in the case of masto, I would say the ruby setup is a bit of a pain. Docker just gives you a pre built image which largely just works

[dtl@8bitorbust.info]

@bloor @ben @wishy @neil I'm interested in how you keep it segmented from the rest of your network.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@dtl @bloor @ben @wishy

It is on its own VLAN, plus ingress and egress firewalling.

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@dtl @ben @wishy @neil separate IP block, separate VLAN maybe separate machine or maybe different VLANs to different VMs

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@neil @dtl @bloor @wishy Similar here, it's in its own segment - my firewall has multiple NICs so hangs off one of those.

I gave that segment its own IPv6 subnet, so if there ever was an issue, I'll be able to see at a glance whether it was our LAN or the masto box (less so for ipv4 though because NAT)

[steve@mastodon.nexusuk.org]

@wishy @bloor @ben @dtl I am put off by Docker because even though set up is easier, when it goes wrong I find it so much harder to debug. I use 2 Docker things (VWsFriend and HomeAssistant) and I pray they never break!

[ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk]

@steve @wishy @bloor @dtl Yeah that's fair

I remember nearly going to war with engineering because they wanted to start shipping software to us (ops) as docker images solely because it made deployment easier for them.

I get on very well with containers nowadays (didnt have much choice when I started owning a SaaS product running on k8s), but (if I was still there) I think I'd still make the same arguments against them driving the CDN

[srtcd424@mas.to]

@bloor @ben @wishy @dtl sadly docker is probably the worst implementation of the container concept, but it useful in the modern world, even if it shouldn't be. podman is saner in many respects. It's also worth playing with "full system" containers via e.g. systemd-nspawn - they might make more sense if you're used to VMs, and it uses the same kernel features as application containers, so it's a good way of getting experience with those.

[david@social.grelli.org]

@bloor@bloor.tw

Have you looked at snac2? https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

In C, no dependencies, uses small files instead of a DB. make; make install works for everything I need from a single user instance.

The old UNIX spirit is still alive there

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@david Ignorant question: is activtypub another word for mastodon? If not, I'm not sure what this is!

[bloor@bloor.tw]

It’s worse than I thought. I don’t blame Masto.host for this, but everywhere on their site it said 29 dollars. But now the email has come through from what I assume/guess is the payment processor it’s actually $34.80, I assume due to VAT that hasn’t been properly indicated at earlier stages. So I am paying £25.82 a month (at current exchange rates) to be on mastodon with my own instance.

That really does feel expensive.

Again, not criticising Masto.host.

[dan@mastodon.durrans.com]

@bloor are you using a lot of media storage. The VM I am self hosting on is 2 core 8Gb ram and 32Gb disk. That includes media store and database and OS.

[neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk]

@bloor I can share with you the script that I run to purge my instance (daily), but I don't know if one can use it with masto.host (or if you would want to)?

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@neil one of the things I really valued about Twitter and miss about (current setup) of mastodon was the longevity of stuff. Someone could search on Twitter and find a tweet I did about some obscure topic 3 years before. Mastodon lacks that, kind-of. But with elastic search I could at least semi get it back for myself searching my own tweets.

I don’t think I’d want to auto purge but I fully understand why some folks might do.

[bloor@bloor.tw]

@neil as a recent example of this, someone here recently asked about my desktop (the wooden one, not the electronic one) and I was able to manually scroll back through media posted and re-reference a bunch of photo toots from when I was building my main computer desk.