Moving to Mastodon
So when it became obvious that #Twitter was going down the drain, I started looking for alternatives and quickly settled on #Mastodon. After a brief stint as @dirkhaun@troet.cafe I began to wonder how easy (or not) it would be to run my own instance.
It has been a while since I administered a webserver. That was back in the Apache 1.3 days, long before Docker and all this new-fangled stuff (which I still don’t understand to this day) came along. So I got myself the smallest vServer I could find and gave the instructions a try. What can I say – it worked (almost) without a flaw.
Now, those instructions are not for the faint of heart. But if you know where to look (and what to do) when, at the end of the day, nginx reports a permission issue trying to serve a CSS file, then you can do it.
Setting up a Mastodon instance is one thing. Running an instance is another, which we’ll explore in another post …