I'm on my own instance now thanks to @mastohost and I feel like I've started a new playthrough of Mastodon and I need to level up. (An instance only federates with others if there's activity such as a user on another instance boosting a post--so I need lots of boosts! I'm not federated with many other instances yet.)

@matt runs a wonderful instance and I'm grateful I got to get to know Mastodon on writing.exchange. But it's cool having my own instance. Or it will be, once I level up some.

@scifijack On a scale of 1-10, how hard was it?

@scifijack @lisamelton @mastohost @matt I run my own instance via Spacebear, and they’ve been great! https://federation.spacebear.ee

@scifijack @mastohost @matt Glad I found you. Haven't seen you since Google Plus!

@scifijack @matt
From what I've seen, mastodon seems to work best with 100 to 500 people on an instance with a common location or interest, so that many conversations stay on the server, and so the local instance feed has enough chatter on it to be engaging without following everyone.
My advice: find 99 more people to share your instance.

@scifijack

It's kind of like the difference between buying a place and renting one.

@scifijack @mastohost @matt I don’t have many followers, and I’m also on a very small #Calckey instance but a boost costs nothing so, there you go!

for the best effect, you gotta get @lisamelton to boost you 😉

@scifijack @mastohost @matt I got my solo instance user up to like 500 followers before I decided it wasn’t worth the monthly bill and migrated here. It was basically the same experience, except the Local timeline is a literal echo chamber LOL. Otherwise… really the same getting followers from a solo as from a big instance.

A few tips:

• Add one decent Relay. This basically federates you with a bunch of established safe instances so your Federated timeline is full. (I had to add a bunch of shitty relays before I found one I liked, then I dropped the rest.)

• (#)Fediblock early! You do NOT want to get noticed by the literal swarm of actual neo-Nazis that live in the gutters of the Fediverse. Oliphant has some great blocklists. Or take advice from (#)fediblock on defederating from the “Worst of the Worst”. Seriously. It’s wayyyyyyyyyy worse that you think, and once they notice you, your solo instance will be pounced. Takes days to fix.

Enjoy! I’ll be bringing notroot.social back with a #calckey app in the near future.

@scifijack On my own private instance, I added a relay. That helps a bit with federation if that's an option for you. But of course, I boosted 👍

@mastohost @matt

@scifijack @matt you can always join a relay if you want to get some federation going quickly, in exchange for a bit of moderation work.

@Fragglemuppet 1, Hugo at masto.host answered all my dumb questions in advance and the process was totally painless.

@scifijack @mastohost @matt you might also want to look into relays, which will give you a more populated federated timeline.

@webuiltthiscity @mahaska @scifijack @lisamelton @mastohost @matt Sweet! Maybe one day I can teach you all how to host #mastodon from your home. Trust me when I tell you it's challenging and fun.

@Nerdfest Been a long time! Good to see you.

@chris That's a great way to put it!

@scifijack

Single family homes of the Fediverse unite! ;-)

@scifijack it's two of us on our instance with 1,200 posts and we're federated with over 10k instances. No relays. It will happen.