A year ago I set up my own Mastodon server at iowadon.org. Elon Musk had just bought Twitter and was quite obviously going to ruin it, Bluesky was still a very small beta test, and I thought hey, why not, I would enjoy the project and could try my hand at administrating a social media instance. So I dropped $15 for the domain name and $50 for a year of a cheap VPS and gave it a shot.

It was indeed a fun challenge getting it set up. Once I had it up and functional it was low-maintenance enough - an occasional small version upgrade, a couple moderation requests to resolve. I never promoted the instance much, and as a result I never had more than about half a dozen active users, most of whom I knew personally. And it was fine. But as my domain came up for renewal I asked myself if it was something I wanted to continue, and I decided the answer was no.

It’s not a cost thing. I paid $5/mo to Linode for object storage, and absorbed the server costs by sharing the VPS with some other websites I host. (The things you can get away with when your instance only hosts a few users…) It was a little bit the maintenance time. There was a major upgrade to the Mastodon server queued up and, for the first time in a year, it didn’t run smoothly. And I didn’t feel like spending hours trying to figure it out.

It was also a little bit that Bluesky has opened up, and my social network has hit a pretty good critical mass there. At the moment I’m keeping an eye on both Mastodon and Bluesky, but Bluesky is getting more of my time and interaction. And so I migrated my iowadon.org account over to mastodon.social, emailed all my active users to give them a month’s warning, and at the end of the month I shut it down.

It was a fun experiment, and I’m still bullish on Mastodon as a social network. But after a year of running my own, I’m happy to be just a user again on someone else’s server.