I decided to give Mastodon another shot here recently, I found exactly one promising leftist instance, mastodon.lol. Bills itself as an "LGBT-friendly antifascist mastodon instance"

I watched another user get banned for saying that Azov were neonazis and I got banned for sticking up for them, then as part of his 240V power trip the admin posted a pity thread where he claimed we called him literally Hitler.

The only other leftist instance I saw welcomed all socialists except "authoritarians" so I assume it's either a socdem or sectarian anarchist instance.

TL;DR - Mastodon hasn't changed at all, it's still ran by power-tripping micro tyrants

  • Straight_Depth [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Prefacing this by saying I know sweet fuck all about Mastodon beyond the surface level, but how easy/feasible would it be to create your own community/instance, like a Mastodon cth hexbear?

    • Ideology [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      There are webhosting services that have pre-built mastodon packages where you can click a button and have it set up for you automatically. Maintaining it is another beast entirely.

      Admins/Mods are often the unthanked/unrecognized glue that holds internet culture together.

    • luther7718 [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Actually creating and running one would be pretty easy but I wouldn't want to be responsible for moderating it. I modded one of the sub's ofshoot Discord channels for a while and that ended up being a nightmare

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Incredibly easy. Mastodon itself doesn't "suck", it's actually very cool if you want to create some private group. It's more like "trying to find good, public already-existing leftist spaces on Mastodon sucks"

      Like, I plan on running a mastodon instance for friends and family and I think it's gonna be sweet, like our own private FB.

    • Speaker [e/em/eir]
      ·
      2 years ago

      It's incredibly easy, and I don't know why people don't just run their own and not deal with petty tyrants on these big instances. If you have $5/month (or less, in some places) plus $10/year for an offensive domain name, you can be your own tyrant and put your hyperindividualized ideological prism over the flow of terrible posts.

      • Ideology [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        For a one-time fee of like $50 you can run a tiny Pleroma instance on a Raspberry Pi.