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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> The most crucial decision when joining Mastodon is choosing the most friendly instance.

Consider using a self-hosting service, like https://togethr.party/ , to have your own instance on your own domain. Much like email, you should never be beholden to another party for your identity; your hosting service should be an invisible detail that can change without anyone interacting with you needing to notice.

I've watched several instances shut down over the years, and have never once regretted the decision to have an instance on my own domain. My social network handle is now the same as my email address, with an extra @ in front.

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I regretted my decision to self host. It’s expensive (for what it is), there are federation issues with some instances, some admins don’t like smaller unknown instances, it requires a fair bit of active management to keep an instance healthy, and you can’t migrate post history.

A good self-hosting service should provide full access to extract all your data, such that you can import it into a different service later.

I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.

You're right about federation issues, though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing. Fediverse instances don't automatically fetch and show all replies to posts you see, even if it knows they exist, unless your server is already fetching other things from the server hosting those posts. So it's a little harder to see other people's replies, which contributes to the problem of 20 people replying with the same answers because they can't see that other people have already replied.

Large instances work around that because everyone's already talking to at least one account on that server.

I hope those limitations get fixed someday, but for now they're fundamental to the fediverse.

You can extract your data, but you can't import your posts on another Mastodon instance. It's fixable, but thorny.

Personally, I think Bluesky is a mix of NIH with a dash of wanting to be a central point of control, that is doomed in the long run - anything that works well for Bluesky can be copied, but the real benefit for the Fediverse in the long run is that Mastodon is just one of many services, or types of services. Every new service gets to hook into an existing network instead of starting from scratch.

> I'm paying ~$7/month to own my own fediverse identity, which seems cheap to me.

I very much agree with you in owning your identity on this sort of thing, but I wouldn't pay $7/mo in order to participate in any social network.

I have my own email domain, and I can host it myself, or have someone else host it for me, on shared infrastructure. Fastmail charges me ~$4/mo, and that's for email, something anyone on the internet requires in order to interact with online services. I think $4/mo for a communications necessity is reasonable, and there are cheaper (even free) providers if I wanted to go that route. $7/mo for a social network is nuts.

I'm not sure how services like togethr.party work, but is it safe to assume that they have to spin up a completely new copy of the server software for each domain? That seems like a big problem, and is probably why this is so expensive.

I recently set up my own Matrix instance (using Synapse) and found it to be pretty wasteful, resource-wise. This is a solved problem with email servers, where one server can host as many domains as you have storage and processing power for; not sure why the chat/social platforms haven't caught up architecture-wise.

FWIW, $7/month is a figure for running a whole server just for your domain. Mastodon absolutely sucks for single-user instances. I offer Takahe hosting for $39/year if you want to use your own domain, or Mastodon + Matrix + Funkwhale + Lemmy for $29/year if you just want an account on the communick servers.

> though that's more a limitation of the fediverse protocols and fediverse software that really needs fixing

I don't believe ATProto has the same issues, and I believe it would take quite a rearchitecture of ActivityPub to solve.

> such that you can import it into a different service later

This is the key issue. There is no way to import posts in Mastodon without manually fudging the database (which I also had to do when running my own instance). As another commenter mentioned, it's a tricky issue, in large part because it's not part of the federation protocol.

Bluesky solves this by separating the storage from the other parts of the distributed system, such that you don't need to move your storage to change your identity, hosting, moderation, etc. Keeping them independent is a smart move.

> It’s expensive (for what it is)...

I host my instance on an always free VM, don't put much work toward maintenence, and haven't had a problem with federation. Post migration is not really a thing from a shared instance, I don't think, so yeah, that sucks.

Honestly, the most expensive part for me is the domain, because I shelled out for a spiffy premium domain. But I'm weird.

Oracle Cloud Free Tier ARM instances are really good, I don’t host Mastodon on mine but I assume you can, of course you still have to pay for a domain name but you can get a cheap one

Fediverse instance software is immature. I self host lots of stuff but I've tried 3 times to self host a fediverse instance and stopped all three times. I get things running, but the amount of care and feeding software like Mastodon requires is unacceptable for someone like me who doesn't have time to babysit server software.

>> My social network handle is now the same as my email address

Spammers sure love you :)

>> to have your own instance on your own domain

Domain is likely linked to your identity. What might look like an innocent *eet today, might end you on a wrong list down the road.

The user who's username is a first and last name probably worries less about people finding out their identity than someone who's username is EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK. But someone who's technically savvy and privacy conscious could buy a new domain name with crypto, one not linked to their identity, if that's a concern.

That's true, I paid crypto for my namecheap domain, still easy to track it to my real identity.

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