Alternative site rules (on a Mastodon instance)

[Son of a Beach]

I occasionally play around with installing/running internet hosted services of various kinds (I once started an online discussion forum that turned out OK).

Most recently, I installed a private Mastodon instance ( https://social.nixanz.com/ ) last week (which is kind of ironic, because I generally don't do social media). The software is designed to have some rules established that signed-up members should abide by. I went with something much simpler than the rather long and complicated set of rules that I used last time:

[north-north-west]

Neat. Are people allowed to suggest rules that they may or may not want to exist?

[peregrinator]

Neat. Are people allowed to suggest rules that they may or may not want to exist?

Of course they must be allowed to, because I sense that you were "being nice" when you wrote that.

Just as I am "being nice" when I write this.

There is only one rule: "be nice".

[Son of a Beach]

Neat. Are people allowed to suggest rules that they may or may not want to exist?

I'll get back to you if I ever figure out if you've just broken rule 3.

[north-north-west]

Neat. Are people allowed to suggest rules that they may or may not want to exist?

Of course they must be allowed to, because I sense that you were "being nice" when you wrote that.
There is only one rule: "be nice".

Nice? MOI??? How dare you?!!

I'll get back to you if I ever figure out if you've just broken rule 3.

The one thing better than breaking algorithms is breaking someone else's brain (but in a perfectly kind and well-mannered way, of course).

[Son of a Beach]

yeah... I don't mind being mentally broken. So long as it's done nicely.

[Son of a Beach]

oh crumbs... somebody from here signed up. That was unexpected.

Note that my Mastodon server is experimental. If you sign up to it, I cannot guarantee that the entire service won't just disappear one day.

I would recommend joining some other Mastodon instance instead. (It's also fairly easy to migrate your account from one instance to another. Although it only migrates your followers, not ay of your posts.)

I've also set the server to require me to approve new sign ups. So it may take me time to notice and approve new accounts.

[crollsurf]

I tried to join your instance but didn't get the email to confirm my email address

I'm already a member of another instance, so I had no intention of it being my go to.

[Son of a Beach]

I tried to join your instance but didn't get the email to confirm my email address

I'm already a member of another instance, so I had no intention of it being my go to.

Hmmm… I wonder if I configured something wrong. Although I got the email for a second test account. I can see that your account is there, but not activated.

PS. I have now manually activated your account from the admin interface.

[Son of a Beach]

Apologies to the one user who signed up.

I was trying to migrate to a different domain name ( https://social.nixanz.com - updated now in the original post ), and screwed up the old instance while having two instances running on the same host. I can't seem to revive it. Just blank pages, with nothing in the logs. So I have deleted it completely, and have started all over again at the new URL.

As I said... signing up is discouraged.

[crollsurf]

Haha, no worries. I jumped on for a bit of fun and help you know it was set up properly. I can actually see why you might want a private instance.

I was on aus.social for years. It was very chilled until the twitter glitterarty showed up.

[Son of a Beach]

Haha, no worries. I jumped on for a bit of fun and help you know it was set up properly. I can actually see why you might want a private instance.

I was on aus.social for years. It was very chilled until the twitter glitterarty showed up.

I expect I'll get sick of trying to maintain my own instance (especially since I'm not really into social media in the first place). I'll likely migrate back to another instance at some point, but it's just interesting to see how it all works from the admin side of a Mastodon instance.

Noteably, I set up this entire instance without any actual financial cost at all. I found a cloud provider that has an "Always Free" tier of service. Of course the "Always Free" virtual machines are fairly minimal. But the ARM VMs are spec'd with more CPUs and RAM and storage than the Intel VMs, even on the free tier. So I went ARM, and don't need anything high-end for this, if I don't have more than a handful of accounts on it.

I also installed a Matrix server on it too, but I don't know anybody on Matrix, so that was a waste of time.