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I signed onto Fosstodon last week to give Mastodon another try. I found the overall experience to be massively improved (last time I touched it was in 2017) and the recent traction it has gotten puts it well ahead of anything else IMO (I'm also testing out Farcaster and a few other services, but those seem pretty niche/immature in comparison).
While Mastodon is a bit rough around the edges, it has that same sort of excitement to me when I signed onto Twitter back in 2006, and most of those same friends/connections from those early days have been migrating. Based on the numbers floating around, I think it has enough traction now/critical mass to be it's own pretty exciting thing. While a lot of instances will fail, I don't think economic sustainability is actually a showstopper. Patreon, OpenCollective, any number of tools can handle recurrent donations enough to sustain larger instances, and there probably will be some alternative approaches as well. Migrating accounts between Mastodon instances isn't perfect, but is a core built-in feature, so while there's a bit of instance roulette, I don't think it's such a big deal. There are tools like https://fediverse.observer/ that might help for picking. It even has a map view, which is pretty neat: https://fediverse.observer/map
Here's a rough view of ActivityPub growth: https://fediverse.observer/stats
FWIW, I decided early on as I started researching into the current state of the Fediverse/ActivityPub that I should probably run my own instance. There are hosting providers that provide Mastodon hosting (although most of them like Spacebear and Mastohost are oversubscribed), but as I was researching, I decided something like Pleroma or Missykey would be a better fit anyway. There are some forks and I ended up using a fork of Pleroma, Akkoma (since, while a bit involved, it has pretty decent docs for setting up w/ Docker Compose and overall seems like the best-performing of the bunch, and has good support for most Mastodon clients). I was able to repoint my account from the Fosstodon Mastodon instance (which included migrating my followers!) to my new personal Akkoma instance pretty easily (the only wrinkle was setting up webfinger since I decided I wanted my canonical account id to not be a subdomain).
For those looking for a bit of an overview of what the current "Fediverse" landscape looks like, some resources that helped me get started:
* https://fediverse.party/
* https://joinfediverse.wiki/Main_Page
* https://www.paritybit.ca/blog/mastodon-is-dead-long-live-mis...
For clients btw, I'm using Whalebird https://whalebird.social/ and Sengi https://nicolasconstant.github.io/sengi/ on desktop, and Tusky https://tusky.app/ on mobile.
I continue to see people stumble at mastodon resource requirements when setting up their instance, but I fail to understand why everyone is going for a mastodon instance for their personal use.
I am running https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial on a micro instance, probably using 100M ram, with a 30M sqlite database.
True, I don't have all features. It is pure backend, but I can use https://pinafore.social/ as web client and https://f-droid.org/en/packages/su.xash.husky/ as Android app. It implements a good chunk of the Mastodon API. I also use it from Emacs with mastodon.el.
Took me 35 minutes to setup. It runs as a single binary from systemd. Most of the jail features enabled. Not even a system user (DynamicUser).
Mastodon != Fediverse.
I continue to see people stumble at mastodon resource requirements when setting up their instance, but I fail to understand why everyone is going for a mastodon instance for their personal use.
I am running https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial on a micro instance, probably using 100M ram, with a 30M sqlite database.
True, I don't have all features. It is pure backend, but I can use https://pinafore.social/ as web client and https://f-droid.org/en/packages/su.xash.husky/ as Android app. It implements a good chunk of the Mastodon API. I also use it from Emacs with mastodon.el.
Took me 35 minutes to setup. It runs as a single binary from systemd. Most of the jail features enabled. Not even a system user (DynamicUser).
Mastodon != Fediverse.
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