Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you might have noticed that the commercial social medial landscape has been a bit chaotic. In light of the ongoing drama, I’ve created https://social.subduethesloth.com, a Mastodon Server for anyone interested in finding a new or alternate social media home on the web.
If you aren’t familiar with Mastodon, Mastodon is essentially a decentralized Twitter clone that has been around for quite a while. The major differences between Mastodon and Twitter are:
- There is no single Mastodon server. Accounts are spread across hundreds or thousands of servers around the world. Your username will be “@username@servername”. So for instance, I am @jkoenin@social.subduethesloth.com
- Mastodon search is not global and in some cases, including ours, only works with hash tags. You need to follow accounts to populate your timeline.
- Following users on other Mastodon servers requires a little bit more effort if they are not on your server (enter full username into search on your server), but once you are a follower, their posts will begin showing up in your timeline like Twitter.
Given that SubdueTheSloth.com is not currently a profitable venture, I am funding hosting myself. If you decide to make social.SubdueTheSloth.com your social media home, please consider helping with hosting expenses.
The server is currently hosted with a major VPS provider using their S3-compatible object store for media such as images and video. It can be upgraded easily to improve performance as users join the server, if necessary.
While I’m not new to managing software and servers, I am very new to managing social media. My goal is to be as hands-off as possible, but if it becomes too expensive or too time-consuming to support, changes will be made. In any such event, I will try to provide ample warning so that you can secure your data if you decide any changes are not to your liking.