Phil Hagelberg (aka Technomancy):
I’ve been on Mastodon since early 2017 and have really enjoyed it. It’s been great to see the Fediverse grow as a user-owned network that can function without a corporate overlord calling the shots, exploiting the user base, and ultimately squeezing it to death for monetization. There are plenty of problems that remain, but one of the biggest ones is that new users have to find an instance to sign up on, and this can be tricky. Installing and administering a Mastodon instance is a lot of work. The liberatory function of the network is only as good as peoples’ ability to make use of it, which requires running servers. If running a server is hard, fewer people are going to do it, and the power is going to be concentrated in the hands of a technical elite. A healthy network must make it easy to avoid this kind of centralization; to do that we have to look beyond Mastodon.
In 2019 I ran my own fediverse server out of my home on Pleroma for about a year; eventually shutting it down for a few different reasons. Then I started hearing more and more about this new GotoSocial server whose goal was to make it easy to run your own instance, and, well, I liked what I saw!
I followed a similar path to Technomancy with my Fediverse presence. I started off on mastodon.social in 2017, then migrated to a self-hosted Pleroma instance for a three-and-half of years. At the start of 2023 I was tired of incompatibilities between Pleroma and Mastodon clients (not really Pleroma’s fault) and looked into alternatives.
GotoSocial showed a huge amount of promise but it was nowhere near ready at the time, so I went with a personal Mastodon instance hosted by masto.host, which has worked out well. I’ve kept an eye on GotoSocial though, and they continue to make steady progress toward a complete ActivityPub server.