I was reminded that I wrote about running your own Mastodon (on Heroku!) back in 2017. Heroku is on its way out, so I wouldn’t recommend it today.¹

Interesting to look back at that post and see how the beginnings of what would become Fission are there.

Digital Ocean also has one click installs & @RangerMauve reports that you’ll need the $12/month droplet size.

This is fine for highly technical people who like to experiment. @walkah is running his own Pleroma instance — I think even at home in his lab?²

When I rejoined Mastodon more seriously 2 years ago, I joined Social.Coop. I didn’t want to worry about the care and feeding of a server, database, backups, and so on. I did want to be part of a group that supported such an activity.

As you pick a Mastodon server to be part of, do some research. Who are the admins? Where is it hosted? Do they have a place to accept donations and support? Can you get involved in governance of the server? Which instances do they block? Or not block?

At this point my main recommendation is to look for a donation and support link. As a “regular” user, $5/month or $50/year seems about the right amount to be donating.

If you do a search on Open Collective you’ll see several pages of results of server admins having set up collectives.

This also includes the “core” Mastodon project.

If you’re going to be running a server instance for yourself or for an organization, don’t forget to also donate to your upstream. The way Open Collective works, you can use your collective to fund other collectives, so you can make this part of your standard way of operating. Supporting open source software development in this way should be a standard expense.³

And anyone who says that’s “too hard for everyone” — sure, those of us who are more tech and media literate may need to go first. But if we’re not willing to support something better, who is?

If you’re checking out Mastodon the open source Twitter-like microblogging service, my first recommendation would be to pick a home server that isn’t the main mastodon-dot-social one.

There is a list of community servers. 
Figure out who runs different servers, what their model is to be sustainable across moderation & hosting, and what kind of people hang out there.

What do I mean? What could go wrong with many part-time server admins? Read @atomicthumbs thread for some examples. 
And yes, you should consider if #socialcoop is right for you. It’s my home server that I pay to be a co-op member of. Read more on the Social Co-op Wiki.

And of course, this is open source software. Consider supporting Mastodon on Patreon.

I know that @walkah recently setup a personal Pleroma server at walkah.social, which is an option if you’ve got a bit of a home lab.

My personal goal would be to see truly individual p2p microblogging flourish. The tools and protocols that we’re building at Fission are meant to help with that.

And we’ve got grand hopes from our friends at Bluesky, who are also dedicated to moving “from platforms to protocols”.

Finally, I help run a little twitter <> mastodon cross posting service called Moa Party. You can hook up your accounts on the app at moa.party and read more about the project at https://moaparty.com.

We’re looking for both volunteer maintainers as well as developers who are paid an honorarium to work on the Python codebase. I wrote a thread about moa with more info.