A recent post from Alan Pope, Mastodon Instances, Everywhere, reminded me that I also used to run a Mastodon instance back when it was all still new and shiny.

My instance ran for awhile and had a few users and I actually enjoyed being on the network. It was much more civil and discussions seemed friendlier than Twitter. Eventually, I shut my instance down as it took more and more sysadmin time, was quite resource hungry and their updates did not always go smoothly.

Recently, I decided to jump back into the Fediverse and see how many people I could follow there instead of on Twitter. Not surprisingly, most of those in the Linux community are the easiest to find Mastodon accounts for.

To get on the Fediverse, I chose to spin up an instance of Pleroma and so far I'm liking this. It uses a lot less resources than Mastodon itself, seems easier to keep up-to-date and even has a clone of the Mastodon interface (see MastoFE).

How long will I run it this time? Who knows, but I am enjoying it again and without the stress of running a "real" Mastodon instance.