So it’s been an interesting (almost) couple of years. I’ve been running a Mastodon instance for some time now and it’s quite the media mover. My Pixelfed instance went down due to some issue I’m completely forgetting about right now, I may stand one up again in the future. My Matrix instance went down due to database size issues - and eventually running out of diskspace. But Diaspora, Mastodon and PeerTube have been running strong.

I plan on restarting my Matrix instance in the next couple of months on local hardware - hopefully using K3s and the Turing Pi configuration, with dedicated hardware for database hosts. My plan is to leverage a couple of the existing NUCs I have as database hosts for all of the container-based services I run on the domain, and then have the services themselves run in containers orchestrated by K3s. Once that is done, I’ll start exploring running a Lemmy instance as well.

If you don’t know, Lemmy is a federated alternative to Reddit. A while back, Reddit wanted to lock down it’s third-party REST API access with exorbitant fees. This spurred a large migration away from Reddit and to a variety of different Lemmy providers. This stressed the ecosystem pretty significantly and it’s also highlighted some dangers and additional steps SysOps need to take if they plan on running federated services. Similar events occurred on Twitter. Elon Musk (hereto referred to as elmu) purchased Twitter, which he renamed to X, in order to shift it into service right-wing extremist content. This has caused a large migration from Twitter to Mastodon providers, causing similar issues to occur.

It’s 2023 folks! Get away from the corporate social media apparatus! A quick breakdown:

  • Reddit => Lemmy / Kbin
  • X => Mastodon
  • Facebook => Diaspora
  • YouTube => PeerTube
  • Instagram => PixelFed

Those are some alternatives. I’ll have a future post on how to choose a proper social media provider.