Considering that there don't appear to be any open-registration Mastodon instances which line up exactly with the policy and standards we have grown accustomed to over here on Hexbear, I have taken the initiative to set one up myself. The basic functionality of the instance appears to be working. I created a couple accounts, I'm able to post, the server is sending e-mails properly. A couple extra features like full text search haven't been set up yet, but more or less its looking pretty good.
Before pulling the veil off of this thing, I figured it might be a good idea to get a proper discussion going about what this community would expect from a mastodon instance. Things like rules, federation, open/closed registration, open/closed post listings, potentially overlooked security details (for instance: nginx logging IP addresses), etc.
To be clear, this is something I just went and did. I didn't run it by any of the Hexbear staff and don't intend to brand it as "the official Hexbear mastodon instance" or anything like that unless it gets some kind of official endorsement. I just think it would be good for us to establish a foothold in the fediverse and start interacting with some likeminded Twitter refugees, especially considering the World Cup is going to nuke the site on Sunday.
We do plan on runing an official Hexbear Mastodon instance, the only reason it hasn't been set up just yet is because we want to move our infrastructure around first, and I don't expect that to happen for another couple months at least.
The more Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instances the better, so I'm all for this to remain an unofficial thing you host. But if you want it to become something official we help host and fund, feel free to reach out.
Mastodon is basically like Twitter, except it's free software and hosted by thousands of individuals instead of single company. Since public officials, celebrities, journalists, and academics still use Twitter for the most part, it lacks that sort of connection to ongoing events. None the less, the recent drama at Twitter has lead to a resurgence in interest and I've seen some people I follow on Twitter create accounts on various Mastodon instances. The main thing it offers that this site doesn't is the ability to follow and interact with a much larger number of people who don't fall into our specific niche. The main thing it lacks is Matthew Yglesias and a dedicated pigpoopballs brigade to dunk on him.
I've already got a home instance that I'm happy with, but I'd love to be able to follow my fellow Hexbears on the fediverse.
Yeah it would definitely make it easy to connect with our comrades, since a solid portion would be right on the official/unofficial/adjacent instances
Glad this seems to be going ahead. I don''t understand how to find the places to talk about things I like on mastodon while also making sure its not full of nazis.
I think the easiest way to do that would be to set up a relay for some decent instances.
elon musk killing twitter is making me interested in making a mastodon account again
Love this idea, but I do have my own small server which I’ll probably stick with. I was thinking, though, if there ends up being multiple hexbear friendly servers, a relay to tie them together might be useful. That way, you’d still have a local feed for whatever server you’re on, but the federated feed could include the network collectively.
That's very cool. I am on mastodon via my real name, so I don't know if this is possible but once the instance is set up, I'll see if there's a way I can follow the feed without having to follow individual users on your instance
It would be cool if Mastodon used the same accounts as Hexbear (i.e. Single Sign-On) so there couldn't be any impersonators and people's usernames wouldn't be taken. It would also be kind of novel to have multiple different social sites with the same user accounts. It would probably be very difficult to implement though, since Identity Providers are kind of difficult to set up. It looks like Mastodon does support OpenID Connect, but I don't think Lemmy supports single sign-on.
Oh dip this is solid. I was thinking about doing this lol. So glad you went ahead and actually did it! I see an Admin has already responded so you’re probably in contact with them already. Can’t wait to see how this grows!
