Creating a Personal Mastodon Instance
People also need to understand they can do their own instance and avoid all this server migration stuff in their Mastodon home going down or becoming unstable.
Having a domain-name-related instance that belongs to you negates any of the down-the-road hassles of migrating. Also, your Mastodon handle today might look like a Hotmail or AOL address down the road.
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Also, I control the configuration - so my software is up to date, and my character count is set at 1,500, though I rarely use that.
He’s written up the details here. It seems like this should be “right” thing to do, but at the moment I don’t want to be responsible for the hosting and maintenance. Also, the user experience (with the Web interface) is definitely better when interacting with people who are on the same instance. Otherwise, various actions require extra clicks, and sometimes posts don’t auto-load.
I assume that hosting and migration will get easier in the future, so I don’t feel too bad about starting out with a shared instance. And having the posts partitioned between two instances makes less of a difference when there’s no full searching, anyway.
4 Weeks of usage history running my own Mastadon instance. Following about 45 people and followed by 25 with a few photos. Media Storage is something you should be aware of if running your own server. Your instance will cache media from the federated timeline and people you follow. There are admin server settings for media retention which I set to 2 days. My toots and media are not purged (although you can enable that).
Previously:
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I've noticed that the Graze extension help a lot with jumping between servers. For example, when you land on a person's profile you can follow them directly by clicking the Follow button.
If you can bare the painful irony, Cloudflare just announced Wildebeest, which uses Cloudflare's proprietary PAAS APIs. You still have to pay for "Images" ($5/mo), though, and maybe more if your API load is high enough. Also, as of now, no video, and no real web UI; it's designed for API-client compatibility. Still an option if you're not willing to manage another server, though, and although I'm in the Cloudflare ecosphere, I can't talk from experience but it does look relatively simple to set up if you already have a registered Cloudflare domain.