I Started a Mastodon Server
It’s called lowkey.zone and you can find it here.
You can find my profile here.
The Setup
I talked about self-hosting in my last post, but in the end I decided to use managed hosting instead.
I had been going through the Mastodon install process on a new VPS when I made the decision. I wanted the flexibility to be able to scale the instance in the future and because of that was starting to setup object storage for media uploads. That’s when the complexity of what I was setting up started to hit me.
If you were doing a pretty simple installation and knew you didn’t want to scale up the instance later, I’m sure installing and maintaining Mastodon wouldn’t be that bad. But there’s also other fediverse projects that are easier and more practical to self-host, like Gotosocial, if that’s your goal.
Anyway, I scrapped what I had at that point and got set up with managed Mastodon hosting. I picked masto.host because I know they’re really experienced and I’ve heard great things about them. Pricing even ended up being cheaper compared to running it on my own, but that could have been just me overestimating the amount of power I needed when I set up the VPS.
Getting going with masto.host was extremely easy and automatic. After my instance was up and running I remember thinking, “That’s it?”.
Things are running smoothly as far as I can tell. I’ve managed to get everything migrated from my previous account (one of the seriously underrated fediverse features) which took several minutes. It was pretty fun monitoring the server and my follower counts during that time.
There was some weirdness with my home timeline at first. I was seeing some really old and out of order posts. Probably one of the quirks of a brand new server. It seems to have settled since then but I’ll still be keeping an eye on it.
The Server
For now sign ups are semi-open, meaning anyone can sign up but they have to be manually approved. But I’m planning on accepting just about anyone who does sign up, and I may fully open sign ups after some time.
Like I talked about before, I’m wanting this server to be general purpose and have a fun, friendly feel to it. To try to make that happen I think it’ll be enough to ask that anyone who joins use content warnings when talking about politics, activism, or anything doomscroll-y in public posts.
New Identity
Oh yeah, I didn’t carry the moddedBear name over to my new account. It was kind of on a whim, but I’m starting to like putting real me out there a little more. I think it suits what I’m looking to get out of social media. I’ve never tried to be super anonymous anyway, and anyone who has really wanted to has probably been able to figure out who I am for a while.
So far I’m feeling pretty good about this experiment. Looking forward to seeing where it goes.