Single-user Mastodon Instance is a Bad Idea

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• Mastodon takes me back to the early days of the internet, before algorithms, advertising, and dopamine-driven feedback loops tainted the user experience. While Mastodon hasn't quite reached mainstream status, the existing communities are enjoyable and breath of fresh air compared to what Twitter has become.

• I've had an account on the largest Mastodon instance since 2016, but I wanted to host my own Mastodon instance so that I could take ownership of my data, control my online presence, and own my handle that I can keep forever. In the past, I migrated my account to different hosts multiple times; however, due to the semi-broken portability of accounts (i.e., the inability to move posts and lists), I decided to have my own instance.

• If you're thinking about setting up your own single-user Mastodon instance for similar reasons, I urge you not to do it. The user experience is so broken that it's baffling that anyone would find it acceptable.

• Since the Mastodon application is like the mammal it's named after (big and slow), I had no intention of maintaining a server. Instead, I used the awesome managed Mastodon host masto.host. The setup was easy and quick, and my instance was up in less than an hour.

• However, I wasn't prepared for what came next, mostly because I didn't fully understand how the Fediverse works. I should have done my research earlier.

• As the only user on my instance, the content I received via federation was extremely limited, which broke the user experience. Here are the major issues I faced:

  • Missing posts on user profiles: If you visit a profile of someone you don't follow, you won't see their posts except the pinned ones.

  • Missing replies on posts: Mastodon doesn't ensure it gets all replies to remote posts. As the replies aren't sent to non-followers, your instance won't be aware of them. This was a dealbreaker for me since I could only see a fraction of the replies to the posts on my timeline, and I couldn't get the full context of the conversation.

  • Post stats are either empty or inaccurate: For the same reason as above, boosts and favorite counts are also missing.

  • Explore/Trending timeline doesn't exist: Since my instance received very few posts, it couldn't generate a trending timeline, making this feature useless. The local timeline was also pointless since it was just me.

  • Cannot follow hashtags: While technically possible, it's useless since you won't discover any meaningful volume of posts. This was one of my favorite features on the larger instance as I follow many less-popular hashtags to discover content and connect with like-minded people. This was another dealbreaker for me.

  • Your discoverability is broken: Hashtags are a great way to discover content/people and be discovered. But almost no one outside of your followers will see your hashtagged posts. If you have a large follower list, this might not be a huge issue as your content would be discovered by other instances.

• Some of these issues can be improved by using relays, but I don't find it to be a feasible solution. It's hard to find relays that will accept you as a single-user instance, and it's too taxing for your server, with exponentially more processing, space, and memory requirements.

• I do understand the technical reasons behind most of those issues. Some of them should be easier to solve. For example, why doesn't the server fetch the X number of recent posts of a profile that I visit? Despite the open Github issues (1, 2, 3), it doesn't seem like there's a plan or desire to address them. Fortunately, apps like Mammoth and Mona are attempting to handle these issues gracefully on the client side, but my favorite app Ivory doesn't yet.

• At the end, while I loved using my own domain as my handle and owning my data, the user experience immediately became less enjoyable. I migrated back to mastodon.social, the original and the largest instance. Follow me there.