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?
80/20 rule.
When you are creating something like Lemmy, where you want wide uptake, you need to pander to the masses.
The /r/selfhosted surveys show around half of self-hosters mostly or exclusively use docker. A significant portion of the rest can use docker if needed.
If you’re in the 20% that isn’t covered by the most common setup, then it can be frustrating. But supporting that 20% takes as much effort as supporting the other 80% (see 80/20 rule), and when things are new it’s just not where the effort should be focused.
So you have all those servers, but why can’t you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?
You could also get a $2/month VPS and run it on that. Beehaw is run on something similar (though apparently $12 a month, but a lot more users).
So you have all those servers, but why can’t you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?
I could. Personal opinion: Linux is frustrating to use for me, and I prefer my servers to bring me joy.
What pain points do you find with Linux? How does OpenBSD differ?
This question is not as easy to answer as it seems.
Eleven years ago - that was before systemd - I was still using Linux on one of my desktops (Fedora) and my only server at the time (Debian). Independently of each other, both systems refused to start after an upgrade, so I had to replace them; on the desktop I ended up with Windows for a long time (in the meantime I’ve switched to macOS), on the server a FreeBSD worked first. From FreeBSD I later migrated to OpenBSD and illumos, all three systems have their own merits and solve problems that the other systems have.
As to the “OpenBSD vs. Linux” question, I’ll be brief:
- OpenBSD just works. No need to be careful during installation, no surprising problems with the init system after an upgrade.
- OpenBSD’s man pages are exemplary, Linux could take a leaf out of its book.
- OpenBSD largely adheres to standards. The GNU tools do not always do so. This is a pity, especially with the C compiler.
- Because the OpenBSD team maintains a complete system and not just a part of it, OpenBSD does not look like a patchwork, but is self-contained, which also has positive effects on security. OpenBSD itself advertises its good security statistics, not entirely irrelevant for servers.
- sysupgrade is a great tool that has no equal.
I think this list could be continued.
Thanks for your answer, being fairly out of the loop on all of this it’s quite interesting to hear. I’ve also experienced a number of upgrade pains. I’m quite diligent with storing important data external to the OS, but it still sucks when the only real option is to nuke the drive and install again.
I never had this problem with FreeBSD, OpenBSD or illumos (OmniOS). Upgrade pains are especially awful if you actually use your server for something useful.
@tux0r @strudel6242 I don’t wanna be that person, but ‘btw i use arch’ and I think you might like Arch Linux (or Gentoo if you aren’t keen on systemd, the only difference being with Gentoo you compile most stuff yourself, whereas with Arch you only compile some stuff yourself) But both Distros have minimal overhead, aren’t junk (like Ubuntu) and have very broad and active support for a lot of stuff. Especially with the AUR, there is almost nothing I can’t get on Arch
I even had a Gentoo installation before I bought a MacBook. (I had a variety of laptops at some point.) However, I also broke Gentoo - by updating the kernel. Apparently my configuration was insufficient somewhere, anyway it didn’t boot up anymore.
I like Gentoo, but it still carries some shortcomings of the Linux ecosystem. On top of that, the necessary compiling of (almost) the whole system takes more productivity than expected.
You don’t have to host a node if you don’t want to.
But if you do, you may find it’s surprisingly easy to set one up with very little technical knowledge. Docker has benefits in containerizing, yes, but it also makes things easy (which is why it’s so popular).
In most cases you just install Linux, run through the docker install process (many VPS providers can do these first two parts for you), download a pre-made docker-compose.yml file from whichever service you are trying to run, then run “docker compose up -d” and it just works.
Running more services on the same machine, adding a reverse proxy, etc, require a bit more work. But once you have those set up it’s simple to integrate further services running in docker.
But let me reiterate my first point - just because others are asking you to do something, doesn’t mean you have to do it :)
Ugh, I wanted to make a few sublemmys but if it’s that much work, forget it. One thing that’s lacking around here are the shitposting subreddit equivalents. r/Copypasta, r/shittyaskreddit, r/okbuddyretard, that kind of thing.
Exactly, bring in the shitposting and porn subs and Lemmy will flourish.
If i can get it working I’d love to get an NSFW Lemmyverse set up. I miss my kink subreddits
Porn is kinda difficult. There are probably few people who want to moderate and more importantly be liable for pornographic content hosted on their servers. Many Hoster also explicitly forbid adult content.
Not impossible but someone would have to do it ^^
I could also totally see something like
naughtyverse.xxxas domain name.Will probably be defederated though.
Right. Lemmy would need at least an option for admins to not show content from certain instances in the All feed. And overall more sophisticated tools for moderating remote content (e.g. side wide mods that aren’t as powerful as admins but still can remove federated posts)
@nachtigall @tux0r Mastodon has quite a bit of functionality that makes life easier in regards to modding. I don’t know how Lemmy performs there.
On /kbin you can flag your content as 18+/NSFW when adding it. You can also flag your magazine (equivalent of Lemmy community) the same way, when creating it.
As far as I understand, you can make a new community (“sublemmy”) on any server, it will be federated.
You can only create a community on your own server, but you could just make another account and then appoint your account on the foreign server as mod :)
That’s not accurate though is it? Community creation can be enabled/disabled from the owner of the server, but there are some servers that allow it. For example: I’m on sopuli, which is not my server, and I’m able to create new communities.
sorry my explanation was bad. I meant you can create a sub on the server that you’re on. Afaik only beehaw disallows this.
Ah, gotcha! Yeah that makes sense
Lemmy.ml lets every user create communities
Oh! Today I learned… thank you!
Hmm well if anyone gets around to it before I do, make one called shittyasklemmy. I’ll even help moderate it.
just make one on your server (lemmy.ml), it’s literally only a few clicks. “Create Community” in the very top :)
I have set up my Mastodon and Lemmy instances on my VPS using YunoHost.
On the plus side, it makes setting up server software ridiculously easy. It took me about an hour with each app.
The downside is the packages are community-supported, and often run a version or two behind the official release. For example I’m still on Lemmy 0.16.7. Still, I think it’s a great option if you want a more hands-off experience.
Not that I wouldn’t want a Lemmy server to be easier to host and set up, but perhaps the difficulty is one of the things keeping troll and bot servers out in addition to good and common sense moderation.
Never underestimate 4chan.
But there are already a bunch of troll servers? Someone even deployed @p@freespeechextremist.com’s favourite attack that one time.
I wonder why the world outside a limited subset of the Linux ecosystem is - at most - an afterthought for Fediverse developers.
I hate to break this to you, but OpenBSD is an antiquated OS masquerading as a modern one, and OpenBSD’s lack of willingness to support modern standards results in the difficulty you’re having.
OpenBSD feels like it’s been duct taped together for decades. Anything “new” seems to just be, “sorry, not possible.” The OpenBSD kernel doesn’t support WiFi 5GHz. The OpenBSD kernel doesn’t support even the minimum subset of isolation features in order for Docker to function properly. Why? Because OpenBSD refuses to add these features to their kernel. There are very likely other syscalls and basic features any given open source project needs, even if it’s not being run in Docker, that simply do not exist under OpenBSD due to the very limited kernel it provides.
You’re upset because open source projects don’t support a platform that is old and developer-hostile. Turn your frustrations on OpenBSD - these projects would gladly support OpenBSD if they could.
I hate to break this to you, but OpenBSD is an antiquated OS masquerading as a modern one, and OpenBSD’s lack of willingness to support modern standards results in the difficulty you’re having.
Ok, let us assume for a moment that “modern” is the same thing as “great”: why do people still use Linux’s terminal, which emulates an actual 70s line printer, although there have been superior input capabilities since the 80s?
That’s irrelevant to this discussion. I was talking about OpenBSD’s lack of kernel features and driver support.
As for the Linux vs OpenBSD terminal comment, I feel like you’re grasping. What does OpenBSD’s terminal to better? We have had augmentations on top of the Linux terminal for years, adding things like auto complete and syntax suggestions that the 80’s could never have dreamed of.
What does OpenBSD’s terminal do better?
Nothing (well, depending on whether you like the
ksh), and I never said it was. The point is that a terminal is not modern either, it’s actually the exact opposite of modern, yet you’re happy with it.I was talking about OpenBSD’s lack of kernel features and driver support.
OpenBSD has more reliable WiFi on a ThinkPad than Linux has ever had - at least for me. It seems that “lack” is a highly subjective term.
Docker is used by a ton of projects and makes installation very easy in most cases
I’d highly recommend moving to a different distro that has docker
There are no OpenBSD “distros” with Docker.
Most of these projects are FOSS, so you have two options. Either ask the devs for OpenBSD support (but try installing everything on OpenBSD to see what goes wrong). Or try modifying the program yourself to add OpenBSD support.
Developers of these projects often target Linux, since it is by far the most used server kernel/OS. *BSD is not nearly as common.
The only way to potentially change that industry wide is to have enough people stubbornly use *BSD and help implement *BSD support for Linux specific tools they use.
Official support is often only provided with a docker setup as it standardizes bundled libraries and other needed blobs. This makes it easier to support many Linux distros.
The vast majority of servers run Linux and the simplest way to deploy services is with containers. Unix and Windows are much less supported and even running outside containers is fading away.
If you are interested, it may be simpler to spin up a small Linux VM.
It is not, as Linux comes with an additional set of not-quite-simple problems.
I feel you, I tried to install lemmy on the server on which I already run 7 other services (Matrix, PeerTube, my website with rails, Mastodon, another three websites with PHP, Nextcloud, Rainloop, some static HTML websites, and probably more). It’s a really small server so not much resources left but everything is working fine sharing one instance of Nginx and one instance of Postgresql.
Lemmy also uses Nginx and Postgresql so I thought great, let me reuse those. But nope, after 4 days of trying I had to give up and get a new Server just for lemmy. I tried the install from scratch, there lemmy would just not compile. Then I tried to reuse the docker-compose but to connect the existing Nginx and Postgresql but nope, Postgresql didn’t want to work with it because of a extension which was installed but somehow I couldn’t get it to work. And then Nginx with the example config file didn’t work at all.
Anyway on the new server it almost worked, the only thing which didn’t work were the websockets because the example didn’t set up anything for them. But I figured this last part out for myself and now I have to pay 5 EUR more each month to run Lemmy.
I didn’t use docker. I went from scratch. You need to be able to compile rust and run nginx or similar
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.
PeerTube can be run on OpenBSD
Friendica has no Docker images listed along the releases, requisites
Misskey can be run without systemd nor Docker
or maybe single-user honk or ktistecAh, Honk looks pretty nice, and it’s even being developed by an OpenBSD developer! I’ll see what I can do with it … :-)
haha PKGBUILD go brrrrr Install everything native, use system package manager, life’s good. Surely openbsd has something similar, scanning AUR may be useful to you to filch PKGBUILDs.
BSD isn’t Linux though, a lot of these packages are entire systems that need many packages and are only supported in one main configuration. Otherwise instead of making social networking software you’re catering to a hundred different environments. There’s no real reason to run BSD for this stuff besides being a diehard tinkerer.
@tux0r Mastodon is well-documented and I was able to set a node up in an hour or so, don’t know about OpenBSD tho
Mastodon wants Docker.
it likes it but not needs it, an OpenBSD dev has your back https://github.com/qbit/mastodon_openbsd
Last updated in 2018… probably unsupported for current versions?
no it works for the current version but you need to check your playbook vars to just get the new tarballs. If you want to see it in action PHessler runs a node at bsd.network that runs on OpenBSD in vmm on OpenBSD.
Good to know, thank you.
Let me know if you hit any issues with it - iirc someone recently forked / updated it to work with … 7.2… i wanna say.
:D
From that site:
Make sure curl, wget, gnupg, apt-transport-https, lsb-release and ca-certificates is installed first
lsb-release does not exist outside Linux.
@tux0r https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/ This is the standalone guide: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/
From that site:
Make sure curl, wget, gnupg, apt-transport-https, lsb-release and ca-certificates is installed first
lsb-release does not exist outside Linux.
There is no “official support” for this. Is FOSS. You are on your own to run it. If my instance breaks I can’t just run to the Devs of the project to help fix it. It’s on me.
It’s a project run by two people. And to be fair to them they chose one of the most OS agnostic methods to help build it. You don’t need to use a specific distro, just tools.
You can port what’s needed over to BSD and do a PR to merge it, even if it’s just a BSD_Jails.md file. But it’s gonna take some know how.
Building a Lemmy instance on pretty much any Linux box is fairly easy and well documented though.
On a personal note, imho it does no good to be an OS evangelist. It’s as true for MacOs or Windows as it does for BSD. Use a tool for its strengths. I have BSD running my firewalls and even some storage, Linux running stuff, windows for things it excels at, and macos for stuff it works for.
I agree with you and I really don’t want to sound like “finally use a decent system, unworthy Linux user”. However, this sword has two edges: I don’t necessarily want to be fobbed off with “Install Linux, you backward fool” either.
That’s fair. Id be interested to see a bsd port personally. You probably can do it without docker. But whether all the parts are ported is another question (ie pictrs). You may be able to compile them from source though
