this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
287 points (97.0% liked)

sh.itjust.works Main Community

7727 readers
2 users here now

Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.

Matrix

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] insomniac 85 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably good advice but not exactly relevant. The person was hosting a server in their house and got raided for unrelated reasons and all their electronics were seized. Had they hosted in a data center or at least had off premises back ups, this wouldn’t have happened.

[–] JohnDClay 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I thought one of the points of the fediverse was to not be centralized in data centers that are more easily controlled. It's supposedly supposed to be easy and relatively cheap to spin up your own instance on your own hardware. Just outsourcing to a data center I think goes against what the fediverse promised.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago

Fediverse does not use magic. They are bound cabels and cpu.

In average any datacenter wil have a better connection to everywhere else.

[–] kakes 28 points 1 year ago

I disagree.

It's about control of the platform. A datacenter isn't going to start making administrative decisions about the "business direction" of your instance. They can shut the server down, but so could a thunderstorm on a home server.

Even if the data center did (for whatever reason) administrate an instance, the idea of federation still holds because users get to decide if they like the decisions being made - regardless of who is making them.

[–] insomniac 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like anything, it’s a trade off. The fact that you can do whatever you want is the good thing. As long as everyone isn’t in the same datacenter, it’s fine. There’s datacenters all over the planet.

If you’re self hosting, you can mitigate the risks by having some kind of contingency plan though. Just having backups in another location would have made it possible to get back up after the interruption. Now, this instance is probably just screwed.

Data centers aren’t inherently bad and neither is self hosting. But there’s different risks that need to be planned for.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you’re self hosting, you can mitigate the risks by having some kind of contingency plan

Like a degaussing loop hidden in the door frame?

Just having backups in another location would have made it possible to get back up after the interruption

Oh. Not that kind of contingency plan

[–] Arael15th 3 points 1 year ago

Like a degaussing loop hidden in the door frame?

I deeply enjoy that your mind has a rail for this train of thought to run on

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Seems like a nice goal, but in the end aren't you geographically limited to where ISP's offer equivalent upstream bandwidth? Even then there are caps sometimes and other ways we still get controlled.