Recently, I was looking at the infrastructure bills for our CoSocial co-op member-owned Mastodon instance, mostly Digital Ocean and a bit of AWS. They seemed too high for what we’re getting. Which makes me think about the kind of infrastructure that a decentralized social network needs, and how to get it.

I worked at AWS for 5½ years and part of my job was explaining why public-cloud infrastructure is a good idea. I had no trouble doing that because, for the people who are using it, it was (and is) a good idea. The public cloud offers a quality of service, measured by performance, security, and durability, that most customers couldn’t build by themselves. One way to put it is this: If you experience problems in those areas, they are much more likely to be problems in your software than in the cloud infrastructure.

Of course, providing this level of service costs billions in capex and salaries for thousands of expensive senior engineers. So you can expect your monthly cloud-services bill to be substantial.

But what if… · What if you don’t need that quality of service? What if an hour of downtime now and then was an irritant but not an existential problem? What if you were OK with occasionally needing to restore data from backup? What if everything on your server was public data and not interesting to bad actors?

Put another way, what if you were running a small-to-medium Fediverse instance?

If it goes offline occasionally, nobody’s life is damaged much. And, while I grant that this is not well-understood, at this point in time everything on Fedi should be considered public, and I don’t think that’ll change even when we get end-to-end encryption because that data of course isn’t plain text. Here is what you care about:

1. Members’ posts don’t get permanently lost.

2. You don’t want bad people hijacking your members’ accounts and posting damaging stuff.

3. You don’t want to provision and monitor a relational database.

“Basic”? · So, what I want for decentralized social media is computers and storage “in the cloud”, as in I don’t want to have to visit them physically. But I don’t need them to be very fast or to be any more reliable than modern server and disk hardware generally are. I do need some sort of effective backup/restore facility, and I want good solid modern authentication.

And, of course, I want this to be a whole lot cheaper than the “enterprise”-facing public cloud. Because I’m not an enterprise.

(I think I still need a CDN. But that’s OK because they’re commoditized and competitive these days.)

I know this is achievable. What I don’t know is who might want to offer this kind of infrastructure. I think some of it is already out there, but you have to be pretty savvy about knowing who the vendors are and their product ranges and strengths and weaknesses.

Maybe we don’t need any new products, just a new product category, so people like me know which products to look at.

How about “Basic Infrastructure”?