The Perils of Running Your Own Mastodon Instance

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So I've been on the fediverse for about a year now. I started on mastodon.social but held off on self-hosting until just a few weeks ago. I thought it was gonna kill my poor server to federate so much (I've heard things about Ruby on Rails, not all positive), so I just didn't. Eventually, I was pushed over into running my own instance literally because I was bored and thought the digital sovereignty would be cool and all.

I first tried setting up Pleroma, but I couldn't really figure out how to have it work with OpenID and how to block federation to less-than-savoury instances. So, I bit the bullet and installed Mastodon. Gripes about git clone being the recommended way to run Mastodon in production aside, I ran into no issues installing and configuring Mastodon! First things first, I blocked a lot of those aforementioned instances. I do not want to see CSAM or hate in my feed. That brought me to the first issue:

Finding bad instances is hard

My first idea for finding bad instances was to go to an established instance and look at the blocked instance list. That got me a solid list of instances to block, but the ones that I wanted to block the most had their domains censored. Finding public blocklist that is up-to-date was an exercise in frustration, but I eventually found one. Some sed magic and a bash script later, I imported the blocklist with curl. Great! Thing is, sometimes...

Stuff leaks through

Every now and then, as I trawl the federated timeline or some of the comments to a post, I see something that makes me do a little double-take. I click on the post, then the user, then check the local timeline of the server. And I think to myself...

Oh god there's so much hate on the internet

and I lose faith in humanity just a little. I check the user, I look at the admin, I look at the local timeline, and at that point I've been ingesting concentrated hate for the last twenty minutes. I block that instance and forget about that.

But then it happens again.

And again.

And again.

And it's up to me, as the sole moderator (and user) of my single-user instance to keep my own timeline clear.

And it's exhausting.

And I begin to understand the amount of pain professional moderators go through.

And I understand just a little more what it means to be an underpaidTikTokcontentmoderator.

But I'm not gonna stop

Because, in my opinion, the benefits of running your own server outweigh the downsides. I have control over what I post on the internet. I'm not being tracked. I can trust my own judgement. People who are wary of users from ultra-large instances are willing to talk to me. I've built a deeper and stronger network.

But, with the increase of users leaving other websites and moving to the fediverse, my job is gonna become a little harder.

Time will tell, I guess.

Hey! You forgot to mention that running a super-small fedi instance also has xyz downsides!

Yeah it's kinda annoying that I can't see the number of boosts / favourites on a post.

What about the technical issues?

Updating Mastodon is hard, but I don't really mind the downtime. After all, I'm the only user.

Can I follow you on Mastodon?

Sure! I'm @ersei@ersei.net.

As always, if there is anything that I missed or that I have wrong, feel free to contact me.