Mastodon, Akkoma, Fediverse

A new post on the Mastodon tag.

Last week I found an offer on my Mastodon feed from Ilja to do the heavy lifting of managing the backend for someone's small instance. More info here. I've been thinking about that before, and it never happened. Since then I've read about the benefits of having your own instance, so I gave it a shot.

Ilja was very quick to respond, and soon I had my own instance up and running. It involved a few technical steps: deciding on the subdomain of a domain I already own (I have several, so that was a bit of a dice game), and adding a "CNAME" DNS record to that domain.

That was basically all. Well, that, and making sure Ilja gets reimbursed for the cost of hosting the instance, a whopping €6 per month. 

This resulted in http://fedi.nlpagan.net. Yes, it's become a subdomain of this very blog/site, and it has 1 user. Me.

Now, this instance does not have the usual "Mastodon" interface. Instead, this is called "Akkoma". It's very different, and it took some getting used to, but it's nice. And I have access to the admin panel, so I can do all kinds of fun things to it, like adding an option to translate posts. For that you either register a free account with Deepl.com, or you message LibreApps. Either way, you need an API key. They hand those out for free, for small instances. I only learnt about the latter after getting the Deepl API key, but always good to know.

A big difference with an account on a large server is, that the flow of posts passing by is a lot slower. On mstdn.social, where I still have the account, I could see over 100 posts come by every few minutes. On my own little fedi-instance, it's more like 5 to 10. This is great. This is JOMO and I like that. It gives me time to actually read the posts.

Tiny bit of the admin panel:

There is a lot in the admin panel I don't understand, and therefore don't touch. I know I can ask Ilja about that, but as long as things run smoothly, I'm happy.

Nice thing: I did NOT lose any people I am following on the old account. I simply exported them from there, and imported them in fedi.nlpagan.net, and that was all there was to it. It's all in the settings, not hard to find it there. (Pro tip: look for 'Import/Export'. This tip is free today, so use it well.)

And this little buddy here, the icon for my instance?

I can change that too, if I want. But for now I think he's cute. 🙂