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It’s actually more like 1,5 weeks by now. Once the instance was there, setting up was not that hard — create an account, promote it to admin, set options through the web interface, and that’s that. Biggest problem for me was to create images to use as the header for my instance.

I do not want an open account policy: the current server is dimensioned for 10 accounts, and since I am responsible for what happens on the instance, I don’t want every rando on my server. But by and large, people I know and trust have chosen to set up an account on my instance — we’re now up to eight accounts.

It’s all working fine, but the day-to-day administrative tasks are more than I had anticipated. I have to approve ‘trending hashtags’, and that’s a constant stream. There is a suggested blocklist and I spent an evening setting that all up — because we don’t want anything to do with nazis and other denizens of “radical free speech zones”.

On some large servers, there have been incidents of people from minorities being moderated for speaking their truth. I got into some disappointing interactions while trying to explain how the network works to people who insisted that the whole of Mastodon is racist, and I put the offending server on a limited federation regime. It’s since been cleared up, but it’s a bit much to have to keep on top of — I do not envy the admins of the large open instances.

In response to all this, I have added a server rule that we prioritize the safety of marginalized people over the comfort of privileged people.

Two of ‘my’ users each donated a month of hosting costs, which I greatly appreciate.

Every so often, there is talk of (open) instances incorporating or turning into a foundation of sorts — that’s something I’d be interested in too, but at the same time I am hesitant to grow the instance because then it would get beyond my span of control.

So far, so good. We’ll see where it takes us.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.