Self-hosting Mastodon

Self-hosting Mastodon was something that intrigued me, but that I was too afraid to try out for myself because I have no technical background in self-hosting at all. I liked the idea of owning my identity with my own domain name and the thought of having so much control over my online experience was enticing. But my aforementioned lack of technical knowhow put me in a position where I had to either learn how to self-host on my own hardware in order to have my desired full control; or I would surrender some of that control and customizability to a hosting provider in exchange for less hassle that comes with maintaining a server.

Now, like many others with my portfolio, I opted for hosting with Masto.host who offer a spectacular service with outstandingly quick customer support. My criticisms in this article are only directed at the Mastodon software and the experience on single-user instances.

A synopsis of my experience:

• Missing replies, albeit not all, making following conversations very confusing. This can be mitigated by using external tools such as Fedifetcher.
• Non-existent favorite or boost count unless I follow the person
• Missing posts on profiles of people I don’t follow or that haven’t somehow made a connection to my profile, yet, so that Fedifetcher could fetch their profiles.
• No explore page because the volume of toots and boosts a single user can receive or send out is limited.
• Very limited reach and visibilty unless when using a public relay, which can clog up the media cache pretty quickly so not really a proper solution. But even when I dared connecting to a big relay on my 20GB storage, I didn’t notice any wider reach. Still felt like posting into the void.
• Discovery is pretty much impossible unless one follows specific hashtag relays, for example those from FediBuzz, that parse the entire known Fediverse for posts containing that hashtag. It is also possible to follow a relay for one server through FediBuzz as well, however, it is worth noting that those work one-way only.

My experience echoes that of many others who went into self-hosting Mastodon with the same prior knowledge as me. Despite these complaints being known to the Mastodon development team for years, there has been no progress made in solving these issues. So after my month on Masto.host, I don’t think I’ll remain a subscriber for the above reasons.