~kev 🐝

I've been running mcr.wtf, a public Mastodon server vaguely targeted at people in Greater Manchester, for about three years now.

I started it during the big exodus from Twitter when Musk took it over and I guess I did it because I thought it'd be nice to have a Manchester community on Mastodon, but also just because I wanted somewhere to engage with the Fedi myself.

It never really “took off”. Not that I did anything to encourage it to. It did, however, grow a small group of users who use it a fair amount. In some ways this is the best outcome. It works, and the support and moderation load for me is basically zero.

Over the last year I turned off open registration. Almost every new user was a spambot from India. It seemed more trouble than it's worth.

The only real problem is the growing cost. I run it on Digital Ocean and, although the small instance and backup I have is pretty cheap, the database keeps on growing and that's more expensive. It's reached about £50 a month now, which is fine but seems a lot for me to pay out to keep it going mostly for myself.

I've also got more and more annoyed with “the cloud” in general. I don't really get why I'm paying all that money for a tiny server and storage when the same amount would go into a physical machine which would blow it away. At the start of my career as a software developer, before everyone went to AWS, I used to run my own servers. People have been scared off of it but it's a far superior experience and it means we keep the data rather than trusting it to Amazon, Google, Microsoft or whoever.

I've been reducing a lot of my reliance on the cloud this past few years, bringing media, backups, home assistant, web servers and a whole bunch of stuff into my home network and serving it out the surprisingly good quality internet connection from Hyperoptic.

Whilst thinking about all this, I got a ping from my phone. Someone had donated to the server. I accept donations although I've never really promoted it and I only rarely get one. I'm very grateful to those who have donated but I never wanted anyone to feel obliged. I've never touched the money I received and that last ping took it up to £200.

I had a thought. What if I took that £200 and bought a reconditioned physical machine and moved the server onto that?

So that's what I'm planning. The machine arrives tomorrow. At some point in the next few weeks – probably after I get back from my holiday in July – I intend to move mcr.wtf onto it.

What does this mean for our users?

The important thing is I have every intention to keep this running for all the current users. Nothing should change for them but I'll summarise some potential issues:

• Performance: The new machine will hugely outperform the current one.

• Downtime: Expect a couple of hours of downtime in July while I transfer the database.

• Reliability: It's running from my house now. While Hyperoptic is great, if a construction crew digs up my road, the server goes down.

• Registrations: Invite only from now on. I will happily generate invite links if you want to bring friends on board.

I'm probably going to change the about page to reflect some of this change in focus. It currently says it's a server for Greater Manchester. From now on it's a server in Greater Manchester. And it actually will be!

Finally, I might add extra services for users. I've been inspired by the tilde concept and if I thought any users would be interested, I'd love to build something like that.

Anyway. That's all for now. Nothing's going to happen for a few weeks but I'd love to hear if anyone has any thoughts!