Given how easy it is to move to a different Mastodon instance, it will be interesting to see in the coming months to see how many new folks will live in the "big cities", how many will move to small towns, and how many will start their own homesteads. #fediverse

@kyle I honestly thought about setting up my own instance - I ran one briefly in 2017 as proof-of-concept. But holy crap, I hate administering email - running an instance just doesn't sound "fun" in this day and age for me anymore.

@Wildbill As someone who administers his own email (which is pretty low effort at this point), I suspect if you don't want to do that you definitely wouldn't want to set up your own instance. From what I've heard from @shawnp0wers it seems like a fair amount of effort.

@kyle @Wildbill @shawnp0wers I’m planning to give masto.host a try for the podcast when it opens back up.

@katherined @kyle @Wildbill The setup, following the directions on their site, wasn't too difficult.

The part that is... uncomfortable is that it uses a lot of Ruby, and while it seems pretty stable, I don't understand the underlying infrastructure enough to really trust I could troubleshoot it when stuff goes wrong. It also uses yarn to install javascript stuff... it just feels like a house of cards a bit.

@shawnp0wers @katherined @kyle yeah. The setup — even back when I did it in 2017 — was the easy part. Ongoing maintenance cuts severely into my fucking off time these days. I value my vegetative time.

@Wildbill @shawnp0wers @katherined Interesting! At least for my own server the maintenance has been relatively minimal. Mostly the kind of things you'd expect running any small service.