@bloor I'm running GotoSocial rather than Mastodon itself. It's locked down as a private instance. I rarely have to touch the thing. It's running on an old NVR box.

@bloor

Might be worth having a conversation with @jerry 🙂

At scale it seems to be a fair amount of work and not inexpensive.

Mastodon Glitch seems to be the better platform over regular Mastodon.

@bloor Single instance of stock Mastodon via Docker, not really much data. Their instruction for upgrades aren't great, VM snapshot saved me when I got it wrong. I've got a better set of instructions lately and it's been low effort since...
Major releases are like, yearly?

@bloor I’ve found it pretty straightforward to host, at least at personal-instance scale. My notes are here https://jamesoff.net/2022/12/05/mastodon-on-freebsd.html not suggesting you use FreeBSD necessarily (but you should ;) but to give you an idea of what’s involved

@bloor I run my own single user Mastodon instance on my personal server and don’t find it to be much work, but then again I’m a sysadmin and run a hosting company, so I’m probably not a great datapoint 🤷🏻‍♂️

The one thing I have run into is Mastodon eating huge amounts of disk space with local caches of stuff, which I solved by setting up a cron job with slightly tweaked versions of the commands from https://ricard.dev/improving-mastodons-disk-usage/
This might be related to my usage of FediFetcher though.

@bloor on a vaguely similar thing. I currently host https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/ at @beasts and also thinking of switching to housing at my house to reduce costs.

@bloor I'm testing out Hollo at the moment on an alt server and it was super easy to setup. Also going to spin up gotosocial to test. Both are lightweight alternatives to Mastodon.

@bloor I run the docker version on a proxmox qemu vm and it’s fine. Upgrades are easy and the handful of incantations you might have to do each time I have placed in a bash script so I don’t have to look them up each time.

@bloor I run this 2 person instance in a VM, not using docker. I am good at this stuff though. Mostly fine, occasionally a pain in the arse in upgrades and you’ll want to read up about media retention or disk space rapidly gets out of hand. When you post media you will see a significant bandwidth spike so bear that in mind if your upload speed isn’t great. Don’t overlook backups, you may not care about the data but if you lose the secret keys then other instances won’t talk to you any more.

@bloor I'm running a single instance using Cloudron which manages the app packages for me through a control panel. I used the free version but did eventually pay the annual cost to support the devs. There are other similar control panel systems around which may work better, Cloudron is just what I picked.

@revk The white text needs a border for visibility. I'd also cut the dog much closer.

@revk couple of examples...

@revk

@revk I mean... given that the logo names the town 'Y Fenni', I can't help feeling that a multi-lingual poster should *probably* include some Cymraeg.

Take 2 - still issue with white text.

Alt...

A cute brown puppy sits against a plain background. The top of the image features the logo for "The Vaults Restaurant & Bar." The playful text includes various dog barks such as "Woof!" and "Bark!" along with a message…

@revk only from a contrast ratio accessibility point of view. Add a dark shadow to the white text and you’ll be good.
Cute dog.

@revk I would write "well-behaved" with a hyphen, but I may be being horribly old-fashioned there :)

@nick must've been the wind

@nick Success!

@nick
Hello there

@nick Okay, I'll do that

@nick Yup, works. Gratulations.

@nick I've seen it, probably because @neil boosted it.

@nick I see this :)

@nick waves

@nick

Hewwo!

@nick if you see this 😉

@nick Seen (and got an alert about following my blog)

@nick hi Nick!

@nick loud and clear!

@nick@shore.me.uk

Hi from Sharkey.
I saw this based on a boost.

@nick no, nothing, I can't see anything, I'm locked in a dark cellar and I already ate all the bioluminescent mushrooms :/

@nick works here

@nick I see it too

@nick 👋

@nick Hello

@nick You're definitely visible from here!

@nick _o/

Are you writing up what you did anywhere?

@nick It did work.

@nick It works.

@nick hi !

@nick looks like it's working

@nick hello!

@nick Naa it didn't work 🤔

@nick I see it!

@nick
If you're not slashdotted by people saying "yes" yet .. yes!

@nick hello!

@nick i see this

@nick seeing you from Canada!

@nick one of usssss

@nick hi from other nick

@nick LGTM!

@nick h

@nick visible from here.

@nick affirmative.

@nick I can see it!

@nick I will follow to see if you post something interesting. Already we can see that you are brave enough to host an instance so that is one point in your favour.

@nick
ACK

@nick from one personal instance to another: 👍

@nick Working here!

@nick I saw it. And I’m inland.

@nick 👋