Social Update

I’ve been using Mastodon as my only social media for a while now. I started on mastodon.social, but moved over to Fosstodon after a while, desiring a slightly smaller, more focused instance. That was fine for a while; the local timeline was actually useful and I found some people to follow from there.

Over time though, I found myself not caring so much about the local timeline and I’d occasionally see some complaints about the fosstodon moderation policies. I didn’t love that, but setting up my own Mastodon server seemed like a huge pain - demanding minimum system resources, lots of care & feeding.

Things reached a head recently though, over some more extreme issues with Fosstodon’s moderators and some people I follow had stated they would be defederating from Fosstodon immanently. Trying to find a new server that wasn’t itself going to have moderation problems sounded tiring and I don’t exactly have a lot of free time right now, but I did remember hearing more recently about GoToSocial as a Mastodon-compatible Fediverse server that was much lighter to run. I took a quick look at the setup instructions, decided that it seemed like less work than finding a “good” Mastodon server, so I spun my own instance up!

I was really impressed with how easy it was – I don’t much care for Go as a programming language, but static binaries do make installation really straight-forward – just untar, set up some config files, and I was off! I also appreciated how the installation instructions weren’t just “use Docker”; I much prefer running things without containers.

I made my own theme as well to match my blog, which was also quite straight-forward – just make a CSS file and scp it up to the appropriate directory.

I’m very happy with my new home on the Fediverse now! I also updated my “socials” footer here to have a more general “fediverse” logo instead of the Mastodon-specific one, since I’m no longer riding the elephant. It feels satisfying in this age of the internet consolidating into like four websites run by billionaires to have one’s own little corner of the internet, as cozy and kind of weird as you like it.