Given what's goin' on Fosstodon-wise, there is presumably a few more people than usual trying to figure out what their next Fedi home should be. If you already have a bit of a following, my suggestion is not to join an instance, but BE an instance (i.e. set up a personal instance). Here's some related stuff I've written and resources!

- Owning my own social: https://shellsharks.com/own-my-social
- #GoToSocial on K&T Host: https://shellsharks.com/notes/2025/01/10/gotosocial-on-knt-host
- Hosting providers list: https://shellsharks.com/notes/2023/08/01/fediverse-managed-hosting-providers

@shellsharks Having an established following/connection web is crucial for this imo. Before you reach a critical mass of connections, it’s much easier to make new connections via the local timeline. Good callout

@phillip Yep! Interestingly, I feel like I've been seeing an uptick over the last year or so in single-user fedi instances. Maybe it's to avoid some "drama", maybe it's for the other inherent benefits. Either way, it's easy enough to do with managed hosting (if you have some cash to spare for such things that is).

@shellsharks A lot of people are getting more and more interested in self hosting everything afaik, so mastodon makes sense as well. I’ve been thinking of spinning up a snac instance or the like on my home server too. I already have the infra 🤷

@shellsharks

Within the first week on the Fediverse, which was not so long ago for me, I decided I was going to have my own Instance. I went with Friendica because I like the default interface and I do not like the micro-bloggin concept at all. I was going to do exactly what you did in regards to having a separate blog and post links to my mastodon before I discovered Friendica.

I decided that I would make my Instance available to others emigrating from Meta though so it is not a private Instance. It has been a challenge and I am a very experienced System Admin with decades of experience or I probably would not have gotten it setup so quickly. Because of my aversion to Canonical and my preference for RHEL, I went with Rocky 9, which gave me some other challenges. Such as having to compile my own php-modules for imagemagick, etc. Which require setting up copr for php to upgrade. Though most of that was pretty simple. Setting up sendmail was a hoot. To satisfy Gmail I had to do some dns record manipulation to setup so-called anti-spamming tools they ask for.

After I jumped a lot of hurdles I then found that the default configuration of Friendica had some glaring flaws and I had to make some changes to get things to run smoothly and PHP-FPM and MariaDB still like to shutdown periodically though I put a band-aid on that by writing a shell script to check whether httpd, fpm-php and mariadb were running, and if not start them. Then added it to the cron to run every 15 minutes.

Since the service check script things have been running pretty smooth. If you decide to go back to VPS please get in touch I will certainly help you out. I can even help you setup sendmail so you do not need a smtp relay.

Though for development purposes I like podman (think docker) I am not a fan of having production servers on containers. My VPS is on IONOS and their pricing is very reasonable. I do not use only my Maridb datastore and it is handling things fine. I could probably reduce usage even more if I cut down persistence some on posts on my Instance.

The main Issue with self hosting for many is that propagation tends to suck, unless you already have a huge following such as you have. I had to enable a relay on my instance to help compensate for a lack of users and followers. I would also mention, not that you do not realize this, though someone reading your post and thinking they could setup their own instance to troll and bother people forget it. Your statement:

@[url=https://shellsharks.social/users/shellsharks wrote:

shellsharks[/url]]Deplatforming resistance: Since you are the instance admin, you can not be deplatformed. Only your ISP or hosting provider could effectively do this and this is quite rare.

Is not entirely accurate, ask FOSStodon. If you run a poorly moderated or abusive Instance other Instances will block you. And that will deplatform you. I know you realize this and I am not mentioning this for your benefit but for those that might think that it would be a great idea to propagate their abuse on Fediverse and avoid moderation.

You take care and be sure to let me know if you need help in the event that you ever do decide to self host again on a VPS.

@phillip Yep. The ever-accelerating enshittification of big tech has resulted in people wanting to claw back some agency I suppose