this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Technology
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I don’t use instagram. The article touches on the privacy issues of Meta, but doesn’t really explain why Pixelfed is a better alternative or if it’s more privacy focused. Or even why I should use this platform other than “hey, it’s not Instagram”.
I’d trust some random people running an activity pub server just as much as I’d trust Meta with my personal photos: I won’t.
Coming from Wired, I’d hope the article would have a more technology focused approach, explaining to people they could host their own server so they take back control of their own data. Isn’t that the part of the point of the fediverse?
Even when running an instance for yourself, you’re not really safe. The threat to your privacy goes from being a third party in control of your data to your own operational inexperience.
I tried to host my own personal Lemmy instance and ran into a lot of issues hosting it. On the one hand you want to be safe by restricting unnecessary access, but on the other hand you have no idea why federation doesn’t work, or the postfix-relay docker cannot send an email, or why you cannot ssh into your own host, so you want to just allow everything and just get it to work somehow. In the end, unless you are already an expert at this stuff, trying to host your personal instance safely is a tall task.
It’s also going to be very costly. Especially for an image sharing website like Pixelfed.
Maybe there is a market for self-service managed hosts like we have with Wordpress blogs.
The big issue is security. Setting up a VPS is quite technical but not impossible. Making sure it is secure is a totally other matter. Then keeping up with all of the updates, patches, and vulnerabilities is a full time job. So hosting stuff outside your own LAN is not something to take lightly.