After a couple years of running a single-user Mastodon instance, I decided that it was time for me to move to a new server. Being able to move from one server to another is a real strength for Mastodon, and this was the fourth time I’ve done so.

I originally joined Mastodon in back in April 2017, after having already been on a number of federated or Mastodon-adjacent platforms like Identi.ca and GNU social. I first landed at mastodon.xyz, a random decision with almost no thought behind it at the time. Back in those days I didn’t really care which instance I used, and just wanted to kick the tires on this new and exciting platform I had only recently heard about.

I quickly realized that Fosstodon was where I wanted to be, so I migrated my account there, and lived happily for several years. It remains one of the best Mastodon experiences I’ve had, but I eventually made the decision to leave and create my own private server. It was partly from a desire to see how complicated it would be, but if I remember correctly there were also some temporary restrictions put in place for a couple accounts I followed, and I preferred being able to make those kinds of decisions for myself.

Thus began social.nathandyer.me, a server I created using Masto.host (who, for the record, have provided an absolutely perfect experience from beginning to end). I quickly discovered that using a single-user instance is not ideal. For one, you can’t really see much in the global timeline, and the local timeline is essentially just your home timeline repeated. New, interesting accounts aren’t easily surfaced, and your ability to follow trends is almost non-existent. Plus, there have been some practical issues I’ve noticed with media retention, as well as toots that I’ve quoted no longer being available after a short amount of time. I think I could probably overcome those issues by changing some of the administrator settings, but I also suspect doing so would take me beyond my space allowance for my current Masto.host tier.

It also has to be said that I’ve generally been more down on social media as of late, and not finding nearly as much joy as I used to. This is to be somewhat expected, I suppose, given everything going on in the wider world. But even in my little bubbles, there has been more infighting and general unpleasantness. It occurred to me, I’m paying over a hundred bucks a year just to get angry and feel bad?! Downsizing only makes sense for now. I’ll still contribute financially to my new host, but probably not at the scale I was doing before.

Having a positive experience on Mastodon partly involves finding a pleasant, positive community to be a part of. After looking through the local timelines of dozens of instances, I decided that Hachyderm is the one that feels the best for me. Most of the posts are relatively upbeat, and it has less of an obvious tech focus and more on the general day-to-day aspects of peoples’ lives, which I quite like.

So with that, I requested an account and completed the move to Hachyderm yesterday! You can now find me here: https://hachyderm.io/@nathandyer.

The beautiful thing about Mastodon is that it makes it so easy to move around the Fediverse and take all your followers and follows with you. I don’t like to jump around too much, but having the freedom to do so when necessary is a tremendous advantage over traditional corporate social media, especially when it comes to avoiding lock-in. I do wish that posts would transfer over as well, but at least I can export them into an archive for safekeeping (not that I ever really go back and look at old toots).

All that is to say, see you all around the ‘verse, and especially my new local community at Hachyderm!