I have never been the biggest fan of social media, but when I heard about Mastodon, I thought it would be fun to try out. This blog post will walk you thought the challenges that I faced when launching my own Mastodon instance. I hope you enjoy it and if you have any questions feel free to reach out!
Mastodon is part of what's called "The Fedeverse." The Fedeverse is a series of open source projects all using the activity pub protocol. Instead of one central platform owned by a company, Mastodon is made up of thousands of independent servers (called instances) run by different organizations and individuals.
Each Mastodon instance is its own self-contained social network, but they can all communicate with each other through the activity pub protocol. This allows users from different instances to follow each other, share posts, and interact across the entire network. There are also many different sites like Mastodon such as Pixelfed or PeerTube that you can use as well, but Mastodon is by far the most popular.
Although they are similar, one key difference from Twitter is that Mastodon is free from ads and algorithmic timelines that prioritize certain content. Mastodon also has robust privacy and content moderation tools built in. You can make your posts public, private to just your followers, or completely unlisted. Instances can also set their own content policies. The decentralized nature means there's no single company controlling the entire platform.
My first thought was that I needed a domain. I went to NameCheep, and after much consideration, I chose the name "Tyrannosaur.social." I thought it fit very well as the main Mastodon instance was Mastodon.social, and they are both prehistoric creatures.
After this, I had to set up the site itself. The first step in this was securing a private server for myself. I have some old computers at home, but I didn't want to deal with having to secure my network and talk to my parents about the possible increase in bandwidth usage we may have, so I opted to go for a paid hosting provider.
After researching, I found that with my GitHub student account, I could get $200 worth of Digital Ocean credits for free, so I began researching how to start my server there. There were many sites that said Digital Ocean had an accessible droplet you could use to start a Mastodon server, but it had been discontinued, so I, again, had to do it the hard way.
After doing lots more research, I found my saving grace, Cloudron. Cloudron is a program that helps you self-host different apps extremely easily on a server. It was so easy to set up, and I did it while watching a movie with some family. Within a few hours of finding out about Cloudron, I had a fully functioning Mastodon instance.
After setting up the instance, I still had one problem: there was no content. I know that you can follow hashtags to see posts, but I still wouldn't be getting many posts that may be relevant to me. After spending some time reading, I found what I needed: relays. Relays let different Mastodon servers share posts with each other so that you can get more posts in your feed.
After a short while, my server's space was all quickly used up, so I updated it to only use a certain amount of memory at any given time.
I did end up shutting down my server because I didn't end up using it that much, but if you want to find me on Mastodon, check out: WhereTheCheese@mastodon.social