Hosting Forks and Custom Code on FediHost

Why does hosting custom code mean signing a custom contract?

Forks

Popular forks of Mastodon like Glitch run more experimental code which lets them "move fast and break things". Other forks like Hometown give options to run Mastodon with more flexible configurations.

These forks are an important part of the open source ecosystem, not just inspiring positive change and innovation in the original project, but sometimes growing to become the larger project outright.

However with hundreds of projects in existence and thousands of forks we can only integrate, streamline and test a fraction of the services we'd like to support. In choosing if we should add a fork of a project that we already support, or a new project entirely, we usually opt to spend those months of work on a new project entirely. Additionally, many forks focus on innovation but as a consequence are less stable which makes hosting them difficult. Because we are putting this code into production on our server we try to avoid the security and stability risks created by experimental features.

Custom Code

Although most fediverse projects have APIs, plugins and other ways to extend them, often custom code is needed to get things integrated and working the way you want.

The issue with custom code is a more extreme version of a forks, effectively it is a "fork for one" with an even greater chance of an issue because there isn't a community or other users testing the codebase.

Best Options

Recommendations for Large Clients

If you are a large clients like government, corporations and institutions we do host custom code and projects, but this includes the cost of manual configuration, deployments and testing. It also includes the additional cost of isolating the codebase on infrastructure that ensures from both a security and resource use perspective it cannot impact other users.

Recommendations for Smaller Clients

If you're working with a fork or custom code, you're often better served by a self-managed VPS or container-based setup, where you control every aspect of the stack.