I’ve worked with Swarm in a startup setting. It was an absolute nightmare. We eventually gave up and moved to Kubernetes.

That said, your use case does sound simpler. As I recall, we had to set up service discovery (with Hashicorp Consul) and secret management (with Hashicorp Vault) ourselves. I believe we also used Traefik for load balancing. There were other components as well, but I don’t remember it all. This was over 5 years ago, though.

The difficulty wasn’t configuring each piece but getting them to work together. There was also the time burned learning all the different tools. Kubernetes is great because everything is meant to work together.

But if it’s just two machines with separate configuration, do you even need orchestration? Is there a lot of overhead to just manage them individually?

Unfortunately, it was too long ago to remember the details of differences between compose and swarm. I do remember it was a very trivial conversion.

Maybe I’m part of the problem, and if so, please educate me, but I’m not understanding why blocking is ineffective…?

And block lists seem like an effective method to me.

The security improvements described seem reasonable, so it would be nice to get those merged.

I understand that curation and block lists require effort, but that’s the nature of an open platform. If you don’t want an open platform, that’s cool, too. Just create an instance that’s defederated by default and whitelist, then create a sectioned-off Fediverse of instances that align with your moderation principles.

I feel like I’ve gotta be missing something here. These solutions seem painfully obvious, but that usually means I’m missing some key caveat. Can someone fill me in?

What are these answers…

Wrong place to ask, but whatever.

It depends on what you want to build. If you’re not sure, start with Python. It’s likely easiest to pick up and get running. There’s a book called “Automate the Boring Stuff.” I think there’s an online version. (Edit: link - https://automatetheboringstuff.com/)

If you don’t want to set up Python (or any language, really) on your computer, there’s a tool called a REPL that you can find online. So you can just search “Python online REPL,” and you’ll get a functional online environment to code. Now, you won’t be able to do stuff interacting with your local computer this way, like reading files, but it’s good for learning the basics of the language.

In terms of software for writing code in on your local computer, Visual Studio Code (NOT to be confused with Visual Studio) is a free, lightweight code editor. It supports every language via plugins.

If you do go the Python route, make sure to learn about virtual environments before you do ‘pip’ or ‘conda’ anything. Also, unless you’re doing data science things, stick to pip. (Maybe some personal bias there, but I hate anaconda.) If you’re starting from nothing, it’ll be awhile until you get there anyway, so don’t worry too much about it.

Most importantly, find a community that welcomes new learners. Learning to code is absolutely fucking brutal, so having supportive people available makes a world of difference. Bonus points if you can find an offline meetup in your local area.