Technology

37719 readers

335 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why is it so annoyingly hard to set up a Fediverse node? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Everyone (and their mother) have been trying to convince me that I should use one of my less loaded servers to be a Fediverse node. However, all Fediverse software packages I checked only support being installed on complicated systemd + Docker machines. My servers don't have either of those, because neither systemd nor Docker even exist on OpenBSD and illumos.

I know that it would be possible to manually install (e.g.) Lemmy, assuming that I won't ever need official support, but I wonder why the world outside a limited subset of the Linux ecosystem is - at most - an afterthought for Fediverse developers.

How can I help to change that?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's "annoyingly hard" because you're not using modern tooling. If Docker is unavailable on your preferred OS, then that OS is stuck in the past. Simple as that.

Docker makes it easy to install a program, including all its dependencies, in a repeatable way. Since you're familiar with BSD, it's similar to jails except with better isolation, fewer security holes/issues, and the software you want to run is preinstalled. Docker containers are essentially mmutable which makes upgrades easy - just throw away the old container and replace it with the new version. (persistent files are stored separately, in "volumes")

You can of course manually install the same software by looking at the Dockerfile and manually performing the same steps, but there's no guarantee that it'd work well on an unsupported OS.