I started my Mastodon journey on mastodon.social sometime 2018. At one point, one of the WordPress plugins I was developing went a bit “rogue,” and that server’s API has been giving me issues since1.
I moved to my own server in, I think, early 2020—that’s three (!) years ago—and it’s been smooth sailing! (Been wanting to write a quick guide on self-hosting Mastodon, but I’m pretty sure others have done a better job by now.)
Anyhoo, the recent discussions on what exactly constitutes the “Fediverse2,” and “fair use” vs. explicit consent, and a slightly unpleasant experience with Twitter “bridges” and the like, have made it rather clear:
I will no longer be hosting, or rather, publicly serving, any user-generated content. (Except for, perhaps, some comments on this blog, backfed a long time ago. Well, I may try and weed those out in due time. And I’ll likely keep webmentions, too. Actual webmentions, I mean, not those from, e.g., Bridgy.)
What that means:
- I will likely shut down geekcompass.com
- A great deal of my “Also on Mastodon” links on this blog will be
brokenremoved - I will (soon-ish) move my Mastodon account to indieweb.social3
- I may again start looking into adding basic ActivityPub support to some of my PHP projects (like that CMS 🙄 of mine)
- I moved back to it just now and some of the issues seem to have persisted. I’ll move out again soon.
- As more and more websites embrace ActivityPub, the “Fediverse” is going to look exactly like that: a bunch of random websites.
- I know less resource-hungry Mastodon alternatives exist, and that I could self-host those; if I were to go that route, it’d have to be something (1) with no public timelines whatsoever, (2) that let’s me move over my account the way Mastodon does.