A couple of days ago I noticed that videos and GIFs were no longer showing up in posts on my #Mastodon instance. Other images were fine, just not animated attachments to posts. I first noticed this in #Ivory, but quickly confirmed that they wouldn’t show up in a browser window either.

A quick restart of the server didn’t fix the problem. Since I didn’t have the time to dig into it, I left it at that for a few more days.

After running just fine for 14 days, my #Mastodon instance stopped working. All it showed was the cute animation of a mastodon banging the keyboard of a computer. My iOS app had also stopped updating my timeline. The server was quite obviously down. What happened?

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.