Julia Evans (@bork@jvns.ca) writes about her experience of running and using a single-person Mastodon server. The post also links to other people’s experiences in-between.
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For me running my self-hosted server has been a pain. It took me a while to start getting content, adding relays and so, and still everything feels “dead”, with no replies or favorites anywhere.
On top of that it was constantly depleting my machine resources. Yes, it is a small machine but it is a one person server… Today the containers are stopped and the url returns a 503 error and still get dozens of request per second.
I was so sick of it that when joining Lemmy I just created an account in the biggest server I could find.
Having done it before my honest advice to anyone planning this is:
- Start with a Mastodon account on a regular server.
- Build lists of friends etc.
- After a few months, once you’ve curated a feed you like, move to a self hosted one.
That’s if you intend to use it “socially” as opposed to, say, “commercially” (ie an cartoonist publicizing their work, for example, or even the corporate Mastoverse account for a burger chain), in which case it makes sense to have that account on a private server (where it’s essentially self verifying, and can’t be killed by a single confused overworked instance admin - in the case of the burger chain, also by an instance admin that would rather not host commercial accounts), but also a private account on one of the main servers for just being yourself.
I did it for a while. Not exactly single person because my wife also wanted on. What I learned after a month or so is that it’s worth paying someone 5 a month to do it for me since there were always something small breaking over a tiny bit of documentation not covered in the official instructions (I added to the official docs later).
I recommend everyone do it at least once if you have the background. It teaches you a lot about the process.
Would you recommend running another Fediverse microblogging software like Pleroma or Calckey? They can use/interact with all Mastodon features just fine. The issues you found…were they Mastodon-specific or Fediverse/ActivityPub in general?
I’ve never used them so I have no clue.
The issues were mastodon related not fediverse related. Activitypub worked great! And it was only on my personal server at the time a couple of years ago.
“One thing that wasn’t obvious to me is that who servers defederate / limit is sometimes hidden, so it’s hard to suss out what’s going on if you’re considering joining a server, or trying to understand why you can’t see certain posts.”
Can lemmy users compare defederated info between servers? think it would be informative as well.
I think Lemmy and Kbin publicly publish a page of blocked instances
