if you want to grab your local feed from everyone, versus those you follow or the wider fediverse promotions
making sure you choose someone stable, since you don’t want your instance to disappear, and your address along with it.
a content policy / server linking policy you agree with.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a big server, since the fediverse is about to be the largest it’s ever been and may have performance issues the big servers have yet to experience. But the same is true of small servers for the reasons above - a single admin server has a great chance of being overwhelmed (or too expensive for one person to run).
I chose a midsize Canadian server, mainly to avoid scale issues, but also because I’d rather my data be stored in Canada (like Boing Boing!) than in the US.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that there are some UI differences in following someone within your own server vs external. I’ve seen discussions about not being able to easily find the external account’s follows or followers, external comments being harder to access, things like that.
I’m also going to assume that searching for new content is local, right? If I want to look up #StemActivity, it’s only going to search my local server, right?
I only follow about 100 people on Twatter, probably only 20 of whom have Mastodon accounts now. I do want it to be as easy as possible to find interesting new people who align with my interests, so things like followers-of-followers and search are up there in priority.
Only if by harder you mean “clicking on that users profile takes you to their server to show their profile page rather than your server”. What’s still a shitshow is following people on remote servers that doesn’t require either a bunch of hoops or shortcuts/extensions installed to make that simpler. But this only matters, mostly, while onboarding. After that you are following new accounts less frequently.
Two levels: it searches the content on your server, as well as any content anyone else on your server has followed or interacted with.
I have a really cool iOS shortcut that will list all the followers for any other user:
The sort of numbers that a larger instance deals with:
The new numbers
I won’t bore you with all the backstory again. You guys can read that yourself in the post I linked above. But we’re closing in fast on 50,000 total users, and nearly 30,000 monthly active users.
That’s around 6x the amount of active users we had before the Twitter storm. As a result, we’ve had to upgrade the server, again. Here’s how things look right now:
Database: 96GB
Media storage: 682GB
Processes: 9
Threads: 300
Monthly hosting cost: $1895.50
A bit of a cheeky post about making your own tiny instance, and how ActivityPub works under the covers.
(Dang, this should have gone in the challenges of Mastodon thread.)
fedfinder.glitch.me/# will let you pull your old Twitter contacts as a CSV, will find as many of them as it can, and then auto-follow them on Mastodon. Will pull in your lists too if you’ve been using those.
YES. ALL OF THAT.
It’s actually the main reason why I’m not going to host my own instance; I already have a day job, and don’t need another admining job on top of that.
(Rahaeli is one of the founders of Dreamwidth, and has a LOT of good advice about how to run a social media site. )
Mastodon just requires a bit more forethought than the site that shall not be named. (It won’t spoon-feed you content.)
Personally, I look up the people I am interested in following and see if they have a known Mastodon account, or I hear about new people on sites like this one and seek them out that way.
(For instance, the incomparable Neil Gaiman was easy to find on Mastodon: @neilhimself@mastodon.social )
Getting used to the interface is a bit of learning curve, but isn’t everything at first?
