took down my masto instance today. mastodon.redpanda.fun is no more.
it's kind of sad, I suppose. I was excited to have an "own thing", on my own domain and everything, but the actual experience of that is that the UI is a mess, everyone left, server admin sucks, and my digitalocean hosting bill just kept going up and up and up.
my last hosting bill was 36/month, for a site with three users, only one of whom had even logged in since June, and an attached Convos that had been used even less. My timeline had declined to the point where it would go days with only one single poster in my timeline for an entire screen.
it feels strange to do this in the wake of certain social media news but ... ironically I think that is exactly why I wanted to do it. my time on cohost, and away from the bird site, and my experience of masto, have all kind of coalesced into a very particular set of conclusions.
- microblogging actually is a bad idea, actually. the soundbite-ification of discourse into hot takes and dunks and quippy remarks really is just bad for your brain, just as it was in the 90s cable news era. changing rulers, or even running your own site, doesn't actually change that.
- "everyone everywhere all at once" is actually a bad model and has been a disaster for humanity. silos are fine, actually. community is good. being able to build your own space for people you connect with, without being subject to the ever present panopticon is, in fact, something we should encourage. Forums were not the bad old days ... they were Discord. I think most people who aren't terminally online have been feeling the same way for years now, which is why WhatsApp groups and Discord and Telegram have all taken off.
In the wake of recent news from the giants, so much hot taking has happened about "the future of social media" and if you want my absolutely honest opinion, I don't think it has one, and I think that might be a good thing for all of us.
I want smaller spaces, with more room to breathe, create, and think. To form, and communicate, complete thoughts, without feeling like I'm fighting the platform to do it. I feel like Cohost has far more potential for that than anything else running right now, and that seems like the mission and message I get from the staff. So here I am.
Plus, cohost plus is only 5 bucks instead of 30. Not hard to follow that math.
So RIP mastodon.redpanda.fun. You were probably a fine idea for someone else, but I just don't think that someone is me.
