Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pbronez 1302 days ago
I agree that a pool of equal peers is tough these days. I think the Fediverse has a pretty good approach, where most end users are on mobile but you can spin up a server whenever.

There’s still a big complexity/skill/cost jump from “I toot from my iPhone” to “I run a mastodon instance for my company” though. Some of that can be addressed by managed hosting. It’s probably preferable to have a “super peer” though. In my mind, a superpeer runs the same software as a peer, but does more work because it can. It should be easier to maintain than a full server. I’m taking about the difference between:

A) manage a mastodon node, with its own redis, PostgreSQL, web server, object storage, etc

And

B) run BitTorrent in the background on your gaming PC to seed the latest cut of the niche documentary you’re working on

There’s a lot of interesting self-hosting projects happening, but they tend to focus on helping you run kubernetes or a similar container orchestrator. That’s still way more complex than an executable.

I think we need things to get a bit more opinionated again…
1 comments
sliken 1302 days ago
Agreed. Supernodes should be near zero admin, and be able to run where advantageous, not just where an expert is available. OwnCloud/Nextcloud running every more services and at least looking at fediverse integration. Various NASs allow local applications for photos, plex, etc. All targeted at being nearly turnkey and friendly to the average consumer.

Ideally things become easy enough that people can depend less on FAANG and do more with services that are distributed. Hopefully the software can get to the point where your server helps when it can, but if it's down other servers would help out. I just bought a $120 ($140 with case) router, 8 cores, 8GB ram, 32GB storage, GigE + 2x2.5gbe. I've love to dedicate it for messaging, filesharing, mastodon, photo storage/viewing/sharing, etc and even have it exchange services with others so that message/photos/whatever can be shared even if it goes down. Hopefully it gets there, pretty amazing resources are available cheap these days. I'd happily trade 2/3rd of my resources for other peers ... if they did the same for me.

link