Instafed Relayer ISO: A Personal Draft Concept for Refinement, Elaboration and Critique

doopledi · December 8, 2025, 8:15am

Figuratively speaking; I was thinking about this earlier:

“I wonder if any1 has done a podman 1drop iso one could just install live and get instafed+matrix”

Disposable. Thoughts? Anyone seen anything like this?

So my thinking here is:

I’m stuck on a proprietary platform
I want to bridge or migrate for personal uses
I run a single podman command (or comparable) from CLI
I get a semi-persistent container, which is ready to go (see gomuks)
MIGHT provide a curses terminal type of access OR a simple GUI
MIGHT provide access to a selection from a group of conformant instance providers
MIGHT provide #tags search
MIGHT be isolated in a virtualization environment
MIGHT align with a “world of institutions” model

This provides:

Matrix + Fedi access.

Potential problems:

Spam, abuse vectors, scraping

Refinement:

“minimal linux kernel” >> what’s the least amount of (reliable) code which might enable this? >> lisp?

Your input.

this endpoint is fluffy and might be redacted as situation dictates

aschrijver · December 10, 2025, 8:49pm

Thank you for posting! I am not aware of concrete projects or examples, but in the whole self-hosting movement something like this may be done before. To clarify… you are also in particular referring to keeping the connections to proprietary platforms, while operating from ‘the bright side’ in better alternatives, right? I think facilitating that with relative ease can be very nice, since most people aren’t prepared to fully ditch the old platforms out of FOMO, anxious to not lose their social connections.

Wrt scraping, there’s also a feature to define. Scraping in reverse. Scraping a proprietary platform is a good way to get your account closed down, but this is always in the context of mass scraping for some purpose, creating a data source for extraction in some other platform. But what if the scraping just reflected your personal use, for platforms that locked you in without proper API’s. You can be entirely shielded from the proprietary platform this way, and it won’t constitute detectable abuse against Terms of Service.

doopledi · December 25, 2025, 10:23am

just writing this down for now

was thinking of: “personal pod search concept” >> a query language/interface for searching from “my data” (e.g. data belonging to my specific mastodon profile)

but then i started to ponder that there has been ongoing discussions about “bioregions”

now: i might start to ideate that a bioregion might roughly align with a VIEW so we might get to see something like this

a VIEW to personal AP data

MIGHT be related to a bioregion (i.e. semilocality)
MIGHT be related to a timezone
MIGHT be related to a governance structure
MIGHT acknowledge device/transit/etc capabilities
MIGHT acknowledge timeliness structure
MIGHT acknowledge attributions (preferably soft tether)
MIGHT acknowledge open data
MIGHT acknowledge “please transit”, “please expediate”, “please persist” where “please persist might have some additional data”

and so forward

this might appear complicated on first impressions, but if we start to consider this further, we might start to identify patterns such as “I have now found out a new method on how to cultivate flux in a swamp, these are the steps, this is the data, please # persist at # bioregion and # expediate for # knowledgeseedvault # storage # seedvault # evaluation”

this might categorize under data provenance, user-centric, data autonomy, privacy

just my flux seed xmas doodle might edit later

additions 2025-12-25:

the pattern and idea i had here was “whether this sort of thinking might in part work towards shifting agency from platform owners – even within fedi – towards people”. but i’ll rest my case on this for the moment.

best of xmas to you all

edits 2025-12-25: some minor revisions to phrasing