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Last time I looked into Mastodon (a couple years ago), I found a small, specific community that piqued my interest. Months later, the owner of the instance lost
by j1elo 4y ago
Last time I looked into Mastodon (a couple years ago), I found a small, specific community that piqued my interest. Months later, the owner of the instance lost interest and closed it. In the end I never registered, but, what would have happened if I did and started to use it in my day to day? Would I wake up one day to find out that I no longer have a Mastodon account?
I feel the response might be something akin to "what would happen if you have a fastmail account and then fastmail closes?". If that's the case, I see absolutely no reason to choose a small instance, just for the sake of reliability and trust in its continued operation.
- scrollaway 4y agoI agree with you. Mastodon does make it easier to migrate between users. ActivityPub (or is it Mastodon-specific?) has something built in to broadcast account migration announcements, supports account aliases, carry followers over, etc. It's better than email in that regard.
- DeLopSpot 4y agoThis is an issue addressed by the Mastodon Server Covenant: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant The Covenant includes a commitment from server admins to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down
- hoppoy 4y agoThat's an agreement with no teeth, they can just shut it down without warning, and then what do you do.
- DeLopSpot 4y agoIf this is very important to you, then you should find a server admin that you trust, such as a friend or a fellow industry professional. You can also use a paid instance like https://cloudisland.nz/ https://cloudisland.nz/ or set up your own using a hosted service like masto.host
- davidgerard 4y agoAny techie on HN could run a one-person instance. Mastodon itself is fat, but Pleroma/Akkoma and Misskey are smaller, for instance. I know someone who's writing software for a one-person server in Rust that is intended to deploy as a single binary file. The problem you describe is real, though, and it's the least friendly thing about Mastodon for new users. I'd pick a large instance to start with, and move at your leisure. I'm camped out on a friend's server right now, he said it was strictly for amusement but he's having a whale of a time being a Mastodon admin. When he says he'll definitely give us 2mo notice if he gets sick of it, I know I can trust him on that. That sort of thing.
- aquajet 4y agois the Rust dude on github? I'd like to help