Julia Evans (@bork@jvns.ca) writes about her experience of running and using a single-person Mastodon server. The post also links to other people’s experiences in-between.
I’m glad lemmy’s fetching seems to be better: once a community is on your instance its there and you get everything except stuff from servers you’ve defederated with.
I’ve been running my own single user instance since I think 2021 (I think I have 4 active users now). It’s worked out very well for me.
The key thing that I found was I had to go out and find people to add. There are existing lists of people, and I also lucked out that at the same time I joined the fediverse, one comedian I like happened to open up an instance which brought a whole bunch of users who were on my level, and once that started then I was able to add all kinds of people from all kinds of different instances.
It was much more upfront work, but eventually my feed was a whole lot of fun and you don’t need to follow many people to have a feed too fast to even follow
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