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”
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.
Unfortunately, Mastodon is killing FediBuzz in its next 4.2 update.
Any idea why they’re doing this?
Do the AI scrapers use FediBuzz or just the same method as FediBuzz? If the latter, couldn’t the servers just issue a private API key (or whatever, I’m not that tech savvy) for FediBuzz?
Sheesh, didn’t take long for the Fediverse to follow Reddit into the “mine mine mine mine!” Mindset.
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.
