I got on social.linux.pizza. I wasn't a twitter user before though, I just thought this was a good time to try Mastadon, with the increased activity.

Yes, I got on https://mastodon.sdf.org/. So far so good.

Edit: the reply is now deleted, but someone asked why I picked this server. I researched sdf.org and found they've been around a long time (20+ years) and the server rules seemed reasonable and not overly narrow or restrictive. Also, I actually got the registration email from this one, I tried some others and never got the promised email.

Why did you pick that?

It's not obvious how to choose a fediverse instance to join.

Pick one that aligns with your interests, even superficially. You can migrate accounts between instances if you feel you made a mistake.

I’ve been on bsd.network for a while. Mostly because I do BSD adjacent things and some folks I know peripherally are there too. L

I would have hoped your average Hacker News user would run their own server, but I am often disappointed as seemingly many people don't even run their own email servers :(.

Mastadon seems particularly in need of a mechanism where you can get a hosted domain option, where you can easily just point a DNS record at some large instance and have it work as easily as email does after you point an MX at Google or Microsoft.

There are Mastodon hosting companies that offer services like that.

Here’s one example: https://masto.host/

Was looking into this and seems kind of a pain. Too many moving parts and unclear best practices. Matrix imo does self hosting nicely with dendrite. You get two options: monolith or multiple services. Monolith will use in process queues etc instead of having them as separate processes/containers.

It doesn't seem worth the effort unless you have some use case--a particular community you want to cater to, or an organization that wants to control identities on a domain. As an individual, it seems a better choice to go with an established server, and kick in a few bucks on patreon or whatever as needed.

I will use MicroBlogPub on my own domain:

https://github.com/tsileo/microblog.pub

It seems to have the leanest code base.

I am currently putting together a setup script for it.

It has an install documentation here:

https://docs.microblog.pub/installing.html#python-developer-...

I prefer a single script to this type of "first do this, then do that, then ..." tutorials. So I will write a script first, that let's you install MicroBlogPub on a fresh VPS without having to do anything.

I'm running my own server for my friends.