friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

coming from Facebook, reclaim privacy, similar functions?

Hello folks,
I was hoping to hold on to the good things that made social networking fun, and release the stuff that has made it awful.

I'm aware of network effect Wikipedia and I'm not going there. Though I'd like the policies income up with to scale.

I'm coming from the positive technology interactions of those iMessage Whatsapp signal threads I have with my family and neighbors. I'm recalling what it was when Facebook Myspace and Friendster were in their infancy.

We live in a world that does have all those things available, so what's the draw, or the niche, to a smaller crappier software that can be used by better community?

Some of the things I'm thinking of for my deployment.

Technically. I already have a home server running Unraid and Docker. I thought I'd self-host for now. That would be getting Friendica setup in Docker, another SQL (postgres) container for the database portion. If it grows or is popular I might do a Pangolin to VPS connection to hide my home ip address.

Curious to see you you have any thoughts. Thanks.

Unus Nemo reshared this.

in reply to drew

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Unus Nemo

@drew

First, Welcome to Rogue Project's Friendica.


Yes, I am aware of Metcalfe’s law though I will take the millions of users that we federate with against Meta's Nefarious algorithm any day. I will always take quality over quantity. I am a Facebook refugee myself.

There is already an official Friendica Container available from the github if you want to go that route. Though of course you can design your own. If I was going to go that route I would, I am not fan of their setup at all.

You can of course run an Instance on your Home Server and if it is just a 1 person Instance with minimal federation (no relay) then you will do well. If however you want to run an Instance with the stats I show below then sorry, that is not going to happen. Neither can you run it from a shared web-server as they suggest in the documentation with that kind of federation involved. The problem is that even if you have a gigabit fiber connection at home the caps on a conventional ISP connection will break your Instance in seconds not minutes during peak federation periods. Due to the high volume of Server to Server communication. For the same reasons it will break a shared website like a standard GoDaddy subscription. To handle a high federation Instance you will need a VPS, I recommend IONOS. My VPS stats are Cpu:8 vCore, RAM:16 GB, Disk:320 GB NVMe SSD, though if you are only hosting a Friendica Instance you can likely do with half that.

I recommend going bare metal and skipping the latency of a kubernete distributed system as you do not need to worry about horizontal scaling, that will be handled by federating. You have no need of it and you will pay all the taxes of it. On a development server at home that you are not fully federating with then yes that would be fine, but I would not recommend it for a production Instance. You will notice that the other Friendica Instances that have constant 504 (database time out) issues are all container based Instances using S3 storage for their datastore.

Because horizontal scaling comes from the federation of many nodes on The Fediverse a Containerized setup pays no dividend for you investment. You can try it if you like and let the latency answer the questions for you ;-). I know we have all be told to departmentalize everything and there is a lot of truth to that. In this scenario it just does not work well. I was thinking much along the lines you are when I first setup my Instance. The reality of actually administering this Instance for the last few years has showed me reality v ideology. ;-)

When you get your VPS and are setting up feel free to ask me questions. I will be glad to help you in all I can.

Rogue Project's Friendica Federation

Rogue Project's Friendica Federation screen shot


Unus Nemo

@drew
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