Back in June I wrote about bringing mcr.wtf home. I was planning to move this instance off a DigitalOcean droplet and onto a machine in my house. I promised an update once it happened.

It happened. This morning, in fact. In a couple hours of downtime I transferred all the data to the new server and switched up the DNS. The new server, by the way, is a reconditioned Dell Optiplex bought with the money I'd collected from donations.

The boring preparation that made it boring

The move itself was rehearsed a week ago against a copy of the database, which is the single best decision in this whole project. By cutover day I had a step-by-step runbook with timings, and every scary unknown had already been met once in a low-stakes setting. All the software was set up, all that needed to be done was move the data and switch the DNS over.

The other prerequisite was backups. The new machine was already shipping nightly encrypted database dumps offsite. Last week I also ran through restoring a backup too. A backup you haven't tested, isn't a backup!

Moving day

The short version: stop the old server, take a final database dump, copy it home, restore it, check everything, then point DNS at my house.

• Final database dump: 21 minutes
• Copying the dump over: 8 minutes
• Restoring into PostgreSQL: 55 minutes
• Row counts afterwards: identical, every table

Then the DNS flip. Within three minutes, other Mastodon servers were already delivering posts to the machine in my house. The fediverse doesn't hang about!

I should say, I haven't moved absolutely everything from the Cloud yet. I'm hosting media and pushing backups to Wasabi. This is something I'll look at but haven't any plans to change yet.

The victory lap

Feeling confident, I applied the latest Mastodon bugfix release, a kernel update, and a reboot, to make sure it automatically recovers.

Finally I powered the old droplet off. It gets destroyed for good in a couple of weeks once I'm sure I won't need to crawl back.

What this actually gets me

• The old server: 2 CPU cores, permanently full disk, ~£50 a month.
• The new one: 6 cores, NVMe storage with room to breathe, and it costs me electricity.
• The database came out of the move 37GB smaller.
• Everything is snappier. Noticeably. Cheapo real hardware embarrasses what fifty quid a month can rent.

What it means for you (if you're on mcr.wtf)

• Nothing changed. Your account, posts, follows, timelines, and media are all intact.
• The site is faster.
• Your data now lives in Manchester, with encrypted offsite backups not in a datacentre owned by someone whose name I don't know. I can point at it.

That's all for now. If anything seems off, or you just want to tell me this was a terrible idea, I'm at @kev@mcr.wtf, which I can now say is a machine I could go and pat.

Quite often, if I show it to someone involved in web development, they give me a small piece of advice. They tell me I should have a cookie warning. They remind me it's a legal requirement. Except it isn't. Because Popquizza doesn't set any cookies. It does use local storage but purely for storing the results of your quiz. It doesn't track you. We don't do analytics other than occasionally checking the raw number of visitors. This is often followed by a question about how I track engagement. My answer, that I don't, is met with visible confusion. Like, what's the point then?

It reminds me of the Reddit page for Mastodon where people regularly come in complaining that they can't get any traction with their posts. That they get so much more engagement on Instagram, X or even Bluesky. They argue Mastodon needs to add features to help people like them. Again, the idea you might not want to add those features seems to confuse people. I read a post on Mastodon yesterday which was trying to make the case that the Fediverse was actively hostile to people trying to make money from their work.

To be clear, I don't think people selling things on Mastodon are doing anything wrong. I don't mind artists promoting their work. I don't mind people linking to shops, books, music, newsletters or whatever else. I don't even particularly mind major brands having a presence, which is controversial in some quarters.

What unsettles me is not the disagreement. I disagree with people all the time. It's the confusion.

What I object to is the idea that every space has to reshape itself around commercial expectations. That every site needs analytics. That every post needs reach. That every community needs growth tools. That every small thing on the web is somehow incomplete until it has been turned into a funnel.

Sometimes a quiz can just be a quiz. A post can just be a post. A website can just be a website.

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!