Great article! Mastodon looks to be a social network without the stuff I hate about social networks — particularly the motivations to post something “off the wall” in order to possibly go viral.

I've got a Mastodon instance running on a server in my basement (Docker container), but, for anyone else considering doing the same, there seem to be good reasons to not just immediately start federating your instance but to instead become a user on an already-federated server. Best argument I've seen is in a Reddit thread:

Please consider not starting your own instance immediately

wasn’t gonna post this but i see a lot of folks choosing to make their debut on fedi as the admin of their own shiny new instance. there are a few problems with this approach:

unless you join a relay or already have a bunch of users you wanna follow, your discoverability is shit in both directions. posts do not federate to your server out of the box, you need to start by following users or seeding your federated tl from a relay (which is its own can of worms)

unless you’re hosting a single user instance, it’s a recipe for a badly moderated instance. managing an instance is a lot of work, and moderating it is even more work on top of that. this is both about the users directly on your instance as well as users that federate in, all the millions of them on the network.

your federation connections do affect other instances. there are plenty of instances on the network, some people you want to talk to and connect with, and some that you want to keep the hell away from for safety, legal, or even just vibes reasons. and the more strongly connected the network is together, the fewer degrees of separation you’ll be from instances you sure as hell don’t wanna touch. federating with a heavily federated instance is a liability in itself, and it’s especially bad if you aren’t keeping up on the game of fashy whack-a-mole that running an effective instance demands of you.

so what would a better approach be? make an account. become a fediverse user first and a fediverse admin second. if you spend even a couple months on fedi you’re probably gonna make connections with a few local admins on the network, you’ll get a better understanding of the way fedi works, and you’ll be more prepared for the unexpected consequences and responsibilities of starting up an instance.

all too often i see even relatively large instances spiral out of control and die (radical.town and cybre.space are two in recent memory) after admins get a bit too lax on server upkeep and moderation. i just want to avoid that happening more, because it’s a hassle for everyone involved when it happens.

edit: this is all without getting to the relatively common issue in this sub of people asking relatively basic questions about how their own instance works after having set it up. like the kind that could be answered by anyone that’s been active on fedi for a month or so