From Self-Hosting to Not: A Mastodon Story

I’m struggling to choose whether I self-host my Mastodon server, or use Medium’s me.dm server. In both cases, I have great handles (@mike@lapdak.is vs. @mike@me.dm). While one is shorter, the other is my actual name.

Experience

Running a solo server is… lonely. I’ve set up a few relays to help populate comments on posts, and create a more robust federated feed, but it’s still a quiet experience. Things like the Explore section don’t work unless one of my posts sees a bunch of activity, which is pointless. The way that I use Mastodon, typically this doesn’t result in an immensely negative experience, but it’s not ideal. With a larger, premium server, I’ll see more comments on posts and my posts will have a wider distribution.

Cost

The most expensive costs of self-hosting Mastodon are baked into the purchase of my home lab server and my internet connection. Beyond this, cloud media storage is around $1 a month. Medium’s subscription costs $5 a month, or $50 a year; more than the cost of the media storage, but much less than running a server in the cloud.

Risk

Running your own server is a risk. People share all sorts of garbage, and that can get federated to your server. Using this at home, and on my primary personal domain, means if something does go terribly wrong, my email or internet may no longer work. This is a fractionally small risk, but a risk nonetheless. There’s also a minute risk that someone could dox me on my personal server, though with my setup that would be unlikely.

Long-term availability is another risk. Do I trust myself running this over the folks at Medium? This one is a bit tougher. While I do trust Medium, and paying a bit for it gives me some piece of mind, hosting a Mastodon server isn’t their main business; their VC overlords may demand that the server is taken down. On the other hand, while I can host a server, certain things (internet outage, moving, shifting priorities) may impact my ability to run the server.

If my server goes down, it may take me longer to bring it back online. This happened while traveling, when I couldn’t get in front of a computer quick enough to fix it. My server was down for a few hours. Does this matter? Not really, but it’s not ideal. Medium’s me.dm, though, has a team maintaining it, and would presumably get near instant love if something went bump in the night.

Conclusion

In summary, it comes down to two things for me; the handle and the experience. For the handle, my personal server wins hands down, but me.dm is a close second. For the experience, me.dm takes the cake. It has a rich and growing community, with some great folks already there (like M.G. Siegler and Anil Dash). For something like Mastodon, I see no real reason to not move forward with me.dm. I may sleep on it one more night before migrating completely, though.