2020-09-02-RE_Mastodons-inefficient-tooling

Re: Mastodon's inefficient tooling, Ecmel Berk Canlıer

original here

I'm sure we here on the smolnet are in agreement on this point, but it bears repeating:

> To anybody who does self-hostable server software, PLEASE think of lower-end servers. Not everybody wants their stuff to scale to tens of servers with everything on a separate box hosting thousands of users. Even if they want to, it's not cheap to do it either.

Especially federated services should be focused on making it possible for anyone to host the service on whatever they may have, even if that's an old phone lying around or a smart toaster. The only way to truly democratize tech is to make software for that tech that's easy to use, dead-simple, and economical to run. I might've messed up the order on that, but whatever.

A big (philosophical) reason I haven't installed Mastodon on a server for myself is the horror stories I've read about how big and unwieldy it is. The main reason I held off using Emacs for so long was because it purported to be "everything-good-except-maybe-a-text-editor," though of course that thinking is changing a little now -- more on that later.

The radical promise of the Web was to destroy the separation between producers and consumers of art that have been erected by capital markets, the Academy, et al. The HTTP-web has pretty much failed on that promise -- though the smolweb has a chance to fulfill it.

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Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Case Duckworth. CC-BY-SA.

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