Thinking About Running A Personal Mastodon Instance

I have the itch to try something new. I have been looking at Mastodon and things like that a bit recently, and it certainly intrigues me. There is enough of a learning curve to get on there. It is not overrun (yet) with spam and AI-generated garbage.

There are several options of software already in the FreeBSD ports, and one that intrigues me is not in the ports, but they actually offer instructions for FreeBSD. I think it would be neat to learn to set one of those up and rewarding too. If I hosted a personal instance, it would be mine, and I would control what, if anything, is blocked.

Also, if I set up a personal instance, I would be safe from censorship. I do not believe in censorship in any way on the web unless it is something blatantly illegal. Personally, I don’t think I would ever have to be concerned about being censored because I know there are consequences to being a dick. A long time ago I was a troll and a damn good troll, but not anymore.

My thinking is that if I do set it up myself, I would set it up on a separate VPS. I would find something cheap and go from there. I know Mastodon requires Ruby on Rails and all that junk. Another option is written in Go, so that should be much lighter and faster. The ones not in the port system are written in other languages, which I could easily install.

I could do that on this saved VPS, but I don’t think it is something I want to do when it is new to me. I trust everything that is on this machine within reason. New stuff to me would take time for me to trust.

Another option is to maybe go with something that is just for me but managed to start with. That can be found fairly cheap. That could give me time to see if I use it and like it and not have to be overly concerned with the security and all of that sort of stuff for now.

I plan on thinking about this and whether I really want to go through with it or not. I hope that I can avoid what I do so often and jump directly into things. We shall see how that goes because I always say I will do that and then randomly just do it without giving it much thought.

Something I learned the hard way is that I want to keep this website sort of separated from my other stuff. I can link back and forth, but I want them to use separate domain names and be different entities. It would just make things simpler if I wanted to change domains for one or the other or just let one go altogether.