- Mastodon.cloud – signed up for this not even having a clue that instances were unique things because like so many Twitter transplants I assumed it was a monolithic service.
- Elekk.xyz – when I realized different instances had different purposes I joined the only “gaming” instance at that time.
- Nineties.cafe – my friend Liore started an instance on Masto.host and I popped over because it was something led by someone I actually knew.
- Elekk.xyz – back to Elekk when Nineties.cafe was shuttered for various sundry reasons.
- MMORPG.social – migrated over to a new MMORPG-focused instance because why the heck not?
- Elekk.xyz – back to Elekk when MMORPG.social was shuttered for various sundry reasons.
- Mstdn.social – I joined this server because Elekk was under new management and had defederated from a bunch of instances that my friends were on, making it impossible to communicate with them anymore. Stux seemed like a nice admin.
- Masto.ai – Mstdn.social was overwhelmed with new sign-ups, and Masto.ai was created as an overflow instance. A bunch of us longer-term Mstdn.social folks migrated to try and help ease the load.
- Gamepad.club – My friend Gaz creates an instance and I once again throw my lot in with a smaller instance because while I am perfectly fine with Masto.ai I missed the smaller instance feel.
You Waited Too Long
I realize I talked a little bit about this yesterday, but I am pretty happy I went ahead and made the move to Gamepad.club. So far thanks to the amount of work that Gaz poured into making sure we had good federation, the experience has largely been uninterrupted. I still have access to the various hashtags that I had been following and am still seeing a similar volume of traffic coming from them. That is one of the sometimes gotchas from moving to a smaller instance, is that oftentimes hashtags don’t work quite as well. Generally speaking, the federation of a given instance is dictated by who the members of that instance follow. The more users on an instance, by nature the deeper the federation and the more successful things like hashtags become. I follow 814 accounts and as a result, my joining an instance adds those 814 connections. You can quickly imagine that mesh being extended for each person that joins a given instance.
Relays come into play to try and solve this problem. They end up granting servers access to everything being federated within a specific group, and by joining multiple relay networks you can artificially expand the reach of your server. So while you effectively live in a much smaller bubble, the local instance… you can still see topics actively being propagated amongst all of the instance servers in that network. When Gaz was setting up Gamepad.club he joined enough networks to create this effective mesh of 4000 or so servers that we were connected to. So while we have a fairly quiet local feed, the federated feed feels pretty much like it did when I was on Mstdn.social or Masto.ai.
So you are probably asking yourself if everything is effectively the same… why did I bother moving? The truth is there is no requirement to really move servers ever. Stux is great and the instances that he is responsible for mstdn.social, mastodon.coffee, and masto.ai are also pretty great. There is a thing that tends to happen when folks become active on the Fediverse. They discover the local feed and for a while it is exciting and new. The problem with a local feed on a giant server is that eventually it stops being exciting. Eventually, it becomes this dumping ground of too much chatter going on at once to ever hope to follow any of it. On a smaller server, the local feed often feels like going to the corner store and seeing a bunch of people you only sorta meet and are as we call it in rural america… “on waving terms” with. I wanted that back, and while Gamepad.club is pretty quiet and largely made up of people that I already follow, I am certain at some point in the future it will be that place for me.
Migration is also just part of life in the fediverse. It is largely considered a “feature” rather than a bug and it means that even thought right now Mastodon.social the flagship instance is being impacted by a round of denial of service attacks, the rest of the network continues to truck along fine largely oblivious. Legitimately had Gargon not said anything about it and it was boosted into my feed… I never would have known because it hasn’t been impacting any of the instances I have been involved with this week. I’ve migrated so many times at this point that while I end up putting it off usually… it is also a fairly painless occurrence and given how often it happens for various folks… it is just accepted at normal. I’ve talked about my long history of moves, but just to throw it all out there here is my history on Mastodon.