Increasingly convinced that people shouldn't run a #Mastodon instance for others to rely on unless they:
1. use a specialised, managed hosting service; or
2. legitimately want to learn about the gory details of how federation works, managing and scaling a large Ruby on Rails application, tuning a database server and background task runner, orchestrating careful back-ups, setting up an alert system, and many more things.
Those can be extremely useful things to learn, but it's becoming clear that it isn't as relatively uninvolved as, say, throwing WordPress on a server to run a low-traffic blog. And those are only the technical tasks.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
aaron
in reply to James Scholes • • •Amanda Carson
in reply to James Scholes • • •Andre Louis
in reply to Amanda Carson • • •Amanda Carson
in reply to Andre Louis • • •Erion
in reply to Amanda Carson • • •Mastodon is honestly a resource hog, arguably Ruby is really not meant for web apps. Maintenance is one thing, moderation is another. I don't think the average Fediverse user has any idea how much is out there that we have to deal with so we can foster a safer place for everyone. It is a lot of mental strain from the worst of humanity at times. But it is definitely worth it. If anyone hosts a server, a thank you now and then goes a long way, especially if the service is provided for free.
There are also other servers if anyone does not want to deal with Mastodon, I ran #Pleroma and forks for years, which is lightweight and maintaining the software stack is a lot less involved. Then, there's #GoToSocial, which really can't be compared to anything else, except maybe #Snac. They are just brilliant.
Small, focused instances are always better, so is having more accounts, in case one server goes down. Just my opinion.