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.
Currently self-hosting my own mastodon server and honestly the setup wasn’t too bad (using docker)… much more straight-forward than I feared.
My main concerns, which Julia mentions, is that if you have a small instance, you are very much an island as the way federation work is not what you expect. For instance, as Julia notes, if you view a new person’s profile on your own instance, it will look empty (as if they haven’t posted anything). Lemmy also has this issue if you view a community you have not subscribed to yet for the first time.
Likewise, my “#explore” tab is basically always empty and discovering new tags or people is difficult if you are just looking on your own instance (I basically have to go to Fossotodon or another instance to find new things and then import them into my own instance). I’ve recently learned that you have to have a third party application basically seed your instance with posts… again, similar to the bot tricks use for seeding Lemmy with communities.
Overall, I think discovery is a big pain point for the fediverse and ActivityPub. It’s great that we can have our own instances and control our own small communities, but it seems that we are lacking the ability to really connect across instances and form experiences that really bridge across multiple communities.
Discoverability is something that mastodon as a platform doesn’t really understand. It really needs something like lemmy’s communities, IMO, to help people find each other. I keep prattling on about how
withwithout algorithms, microblogging needs to interact much more seamlessly with group-based platforms like lemmy.EDIT: forgot the “out” in “without”
Lemmy in particular is actually reinventing usenet to a very large degree.
Yea I read this, and as someone that would ideally see themselves self-hosting at some point, who also knew about all of these issues already, I was surprised at how much reading about them all in one place put me off of the idea and even mastodon in general.
For some reason their final line about sticking around mastodon because most of the Linux/tech crowd are there right now really struck as me criticising with faint praise (whether intentional or not).
I feel like I am repeatedly reminded of how Mastodon is really an awkward middle ground for social media.
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.
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.
just curious what things were breaking? I’ve been running my own instance for around 8 months now and apart from updating it every month or so I’ve had no issues.
For me, I didn’t have all that much space so the daily cache was filling up quite fast. At the time, there were also libraries that you had to get that were not mentioned in the official install instructions. I found out what to do on a random discord later on. I added the additional install instructions for future people to not be confused.
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.
I’ve been running my own single user instance since I think 2021 (I think I have 4 active users now). It’s worked out very well for me.
The key thing that I found was I had to go out and find people to add. There are existing lists of people, and I also lucked out that at the same time I joined the fediverse, one comedian I like happened to open up an instance which brought a whole bunch of users who were on my level, and once that started then I was able to add all kinds of people from all kinds of different instances.
It was much more upfront work, but eventually my feed was a whole lot of fun and you don’t need to follow many people to have a feed too fast to even follow
“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
seems like the main complaints are ‘im a single person who now requires multi-user resources for a multi-user piece of software’.
isnt that kinda how it works?
I’m glad lemmy’s fetching seems to be better: once a community is on your instance its there and you get everything except stuff from servers you’ve defederated with.
