From Self-Hosted to Community-Driven: Why I Moved My Mastodon Account to Hachyderm.io

I've made the decision to move my Mastodon account from a self-hosted instance to one hosted on hachyderm.io. There are several reasons for this move that I will explain in this post.

Maintenance

When you host your own Mastodon instance, it becomes your responsibility to ensure that it is up to date. Recently, a new Mastodon version was released, and I needed to update my instance that was created with the Mastodon droplet from the Digital Ocean store. Although the initial installation was quite easy, upgrading to the latest version was not seamless. I had to log into the shell and manually go through the upgrade steps. Unfortunately, the upgrade did not go smoothly for me, and I needed to reboot the server in the middle of the process. I eventually got the upgrade to finish, but my instance doesn't seem to be working correctly. For example, I don't see as many recent posts as I do on a different account on a separate instance.

In a previous post, I mentioned trying Wildebeest, which is an open-source Mastodon-compatible server. One benefit of Wildebeest is that the project created an upgrade process, where you just synchronize the changes from the GitHub repository. I set up an instance of Wildebeest, but when I tried to migrate my Mastodon account to this new instance, I hit a roadblock. Even though Wildebeest is Mastodon-compatible, it doesn't support migrating accounts between Mastodon and Wildebeest.

Community

My self-hosted instance only had my account, which made it easy for me to follow other Mastodon accounts and for these accounts to follow me. However, this is only one aspect of Mastodon. Choosing an instance with a community is beneficial because you get to see the content that others in the community are sharing. This creates a sense of community that you don't see with a single account, self-hosted instance.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I've decided to move my Mastodon account to the hachyderm.io Mastodon instance. This instance is a safe space primarily composed of tech industry professionals. If you're interested in following me, you can find my profile here.