[abdullahkhalids]

Isn't Mastodon supposed to not-scale? Basically, every server should be small enough that it can be reasonably moderated manually. If Mastodon scales to millions of users, we will be back to needing automated methods for moderation which have huge positive and negative errors.

Mastodon would likely make adoption much easier if these install [1] instructions were replaced by `apt-get install mastodon`, and configuration [2] was done in UI, rather than some text file.

Even that is too difficult. Hosting a mastodon instance should be as technically easy as starting a discord server.

[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/

[2] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/config/

[tkellogg]

There's 2 ways mastodon can scale (or not):

1. Per-server

2. Network-wide

Moderation load is per-server scaling, mostly. I'd argue that if the load gets to be too much, moderators do less moderating and people decide to migrate to other servers. That's kind of a clean scaling strategy, tbh.

However, adding servers isn't a great story. There's n^2 network connections (worst case) that need to be made to service all subscriptions. That's definitely a scaling problem, although probably addressable via an architecture inspired by gossip protocols.

[kstrauser]

There's a certain amount of irreducible complexity. There are a lot of things to configure! For instance, what database server do I want to connect to? What mailserver to use for transactional messages, and how do I authenticate to it? Where do I store images? Which Redis do I point at?

Someone who wants to avoid all that can register with a hosted service like masto.host that does it all for them.

[abdullahkhalids]

The average mastodon server has 1k users, and the median has likely much fewer [1]. All of these choices are immaterial for the median server.

Just set reasonable defaults so that local gym manager's son/daughter can set them up with the gym's server in a couple of hours. And then leave these instructions for the advanced users who want to pay money for large servers.

[1] https://mastodon-analytics.com/

[kstrauser]

OK, what's your default mail settings at a minimum? You can't really run a server with users other than yourself without that.

[abdullahkhalids]

That's a fair comment. For small servers, you can probably just get away with inputting the smtp details of any regular account.

But probably not a good idea, and you want to host your own mail server. There are also the domain name settings that you do have to put in. I don't know mastodon, but mailinabox has these settings [1] that took me a while to figure out.

My proposal is to write a software that is layer on top of popular domain name registrars' apis. The user just plugs in the api key into the software, and the software does the configuration on behalf of the user. The mastodon installer can then use this software to set up the mail and domain name settings.

I want to finish with one of my favorite facts: At it's peak LimeWire (a social media of sorts) was installed on 1/3rd of computers worldwide [2]. A dead simple installer that any grandma could follow ensured that it got there.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/guide.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire