I just started renting a basic VPS through Racknerd with the intent to use it as a reverse proxy to point friends to my game server instances running at home without exposing my public IP. I could not figure out how to get it to work so I gave up after days of trying and am now using playit.gg. I prepaid for a year of the VPS. What cool project should I try on it now?
Yeah there are basically trade-offs that need to be decided. You shouldn’t need a server farm to start a new small instance, but on the other hand, if everything gets hotlinked from the big instances that can also lead to problems. It also means that when the large instance begins suffering from performance problems or downtime, it directly impacts other instances with broken images and stuff.
I think part of the design decision made by Mastodon was to make it so users don’t have to send any requests to third party instances, which may or may not be operated with malicious intent (I’m not 100% sure on this, though). There are alternative projects like Pleroma and Misskey which provide a very similar federated microblogging format but aren’t as heavy to operate.