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I have been burned by Fediverse so badly I will never go back. I joined a Mastodon instance with 3k+ other users and made several hundred posts.. until one day

I have been burned by Fediverse so badly I will never go back. I joined a Mastodon instance with 3k+ other users and made several hundred posts.. until one day when login failed. Turns out the admin lied about a lot of things (like backups) and an unpaid bill wiped the machine. Migrations are not possible when original server is offline, so I lost many months of content. Running an instance by myself is no fun, community is the point. I see no obvious solution but wont personally ever touch another ActivityPub based social media.

dabluecaboose 3y ago
>Migrations are not possible when original server is offline, so I lost many months of content. >Running an instance by myself is no fun, community is the point. I might be missing something (in which case pardon me), but isn't one of the strengths of a federated system that you could "roll your own" just to host your account and then engage on other servers with that account? I'm imagining it as email, and your email provider accidentally wiped your account. My perception of the federated reddit clone might be off, though.
- v64 3y ago
  This is correct. While it's true that running your own instance is far from simple if you don't have server experience, in my opinion it's the ideal way to interact with the fediverse. I run my own instance, so I know my content is regularly backed up and I have access to the entire fediverse (many larger instances will block other instances at the server level for moderation reasons, so users on those servers are unable to see any content from the blocked instance). As for community, you have to seek out users on other servers to follow in order to bootstrap yourself, but once you've done that, their posts will federate to your instance and vice versa. You can also go directly to other sites and copy the thread link into your instance to interact with it, or if the site supports it, you can log in via OAuth with your own account and interact natively with the content on the other instance.

dabluecaboose 3y ago

>Migrations are not possible when original server is offline, so I lost many months of content. >Running an instance by myself is no fun, community is the point. I might be missing something (in which case pardon me), but isn't one of the strengths of a federated system that you could "roll your own" just to host your account and then engage on other servers with that account? I'm imagining it as email, and your email provider accidentally wiped your account. My perception of the federated reddit clone might be off, though.

v64 3y ago
This is correct. While it's true that running your own instance is far from simple if you don't have server experience, in my opinion it's the ideal way to interact with the fediverse. I run my own instance, so I know my content is regularly backed up and I have access to the entire fediverse (many larger instances will block other instances at the server level for moderation reasons, so users on those servers are unable to see any content from the blocked instance). As for community, you have to seek out users on other servers to follow in order to bootstrap yourself, but once you've done that, their posts will federate to your instance and vice versa. You can also go directly to other sites and copy the thread link into your instance to interact with it, or if the site supports it, you can log in via OAuth with your own account and interact natively with the content on the other instance.