I’m not entirely sure how to ask this, but is there some way for a Mastodon server to host only its own content while being accessible to others?
If I understood the basics of Mastodon correctly, one Mastodon server will automatically download content from another if they are federated.
That obviously leaves the potential of downloading illegal content from a rogue or unmanaged server, which may be a liability for server owners. Of course - you can defederate but I imagine that certain entities that focus on publishing information would rather not have to deal with constant moderation.
Thus, would it be possible for a server to never download from any other server (federated or not) but have its content available to any servers that federate with it? Does a feature like this exist?
I don’t really understand your idea/question.
if the server doesn’t download anything from any other server you as a user will not be able to see any of the content from federated servers. when you request a feed your instance gives you the list of posts that it knows about
The context that I am thinking of is say some sort of authority that previously used twitter to disseminate information.
For example @[email protected] on mastodon is used as an earthquake warning service. I don’t really see any direct interactions on their masto, but they have 20k followers and is obviously a useful service.
I’d imagine that others might consider using Mastodon in a similar way, but they don’t because you have to manage an entire server and take care to remove unwanted content that was downloaded locally.
I think it could draw in both more users and corporations if there was a one way flow of information. Many people used twitter for news updates and more and I feel like mastodon could replace that.
If it was stupid easy to set up a broadcasting service on mastodon like that, that are opt-in by default could benefit many.
It might be over-engineering with the presence of RSS feeds and such but, if something could be tightly integrated with Mastodon to achieve the same goal of easily disseminating information to various servers, it would draw both users and companies.
I don’t think mastodon caches remote content at all, and only caches posts that a user on the server requests, so if you have a 0 following account the only that would be received are replies
What you’re describing is a blog. Writefreely is just one of many examples of a federated blog, and WordPress now has this function built-in after aquiring the ActivityPub plugin.
This is almost what I want. I looked into it and you can follow from mastodon, but it just gives a post title and a link. That’s probably because it’s a full blogging architecture. I don’t imagine users would want to have to click a link for a short bit of information.
If they could be married in some way, it would probably be perfect.
I think your server will only download content if one of your users views/subscribes to it, so maybe you could disable signups so that you’re the only user on your server? This would still allow users on other servers to subscribe to your communities.
