Have any technical details on how this works? And are you planning on charging for the service?
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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this is early testing phase. I have created and deployed a lemmy server and mattermost modules successfully and it works great.
technical details: all this works via cloud instances kinda like architecture, i create a instance (container or vm based on software req) and launch automated scripts to setup everything so people don't have to mess up working with insecure configurations. The backend api is golang and frontend is vuejs. I also have a WAF and security protocols to mitigate basic security flaws and botnet attacks. I need feedback on what our oss community surfers the most when hosting federated communities.
business side: I dont intend to charge for things in testing phase cause all i need is good feedback but as the server demands grows i'll be working with whatever you'll be paying for private instance (idk like $2 a month ?).
motivation: people use proprietary products cause they are already hosted and just avaiable. If we make this with oss products people will start using it. Making lemmy easy to setup will boost more community interaction and make lifes of current community mods easier :)
$2/month per instance? That won't even cover your server costs at the cheapest provider that you can't think off. What about storage? Taxes? Payment processor fees? Your labor?
for one instace you're correct but this will work when i have several instances running medium size applications.
for someone running a application which have 1k active monthly users this won't work.
For labour am the only one working on it and I don't intend on profit for now just cutting even.
So your idea is to oversubscribe your servers with the expectation that no one will notice?
Not only this is a disgusting practice, it won't happen at the scale you'd need. Hosting fediverse applications are not like hosting low traffic blog sites, even instances with a few daily active users will require 1-2 gigs of RAM and tens of gigs of storage.
you're talking about problems i haven't thought about yet. am not charging anything right now am trying to build. If more resources are required I'll allocate and charge them.
further am not getting much interest from community so far, I'll repurpose it or make it some oss project, lol
You are not getting interest from the community because you jumped into coding before even checking how the business would work. I'm all for experimenting and trying things out in practice before overthinking and over-designing, but in this case it would definitely help you if you did some dogfodding and ran an instance for yourself before offering for others.
you're right. I'll run a server myself for some time. I have setup for lemmy and matrix so I'll start with them.
How are you handling mail?
mail requires reputation to work properly and not land in spam. i don't have mail services for now but that can configured by the user to work with something like mailgun or personal gmail account.
am working with oss saas like lemmy, mattermost, matrix for now
I think you misunderstood. Lemmy user validation uses mail. Howndoes your SaaS handle that.
oh, that kind of thing is handeled in the basic lemmy config file. I have a smtp server container deployed along with pict-rs, postgresql lemmy and lemmy-ui so you can use email verification and deploy full featured lemmy install :)