I had been staying for some time at the infosec.exchange instance since I wanted to give a try to some Mastodon instances, but at the moment I signed up, there didn’t seem to be much of software choices to host your own instances (Mastodon itself and Pleroma mostly) and I wasn’t either feeling like posting much at all if I can’t have my own instance.
However my eyes turned recently into the GoToSocial when I was looking at fediverse related projects in Github, and I’m still wondering how I did not spot it before, since it had its first releases out in Nov 2021 already. A lot of time has passed since that obviously and GoToSocial has matured a lot. I’ve had it in production for a few days, and I decided that if it survives (it did!) an upgrade to a newer version, I will eventually migrate from infosec.exchange to the @[email protected] account!
Account migration features are not yet supported at the GoToSocial’s current version (they’re planned though to be released out soon) but I’ve a good feeling about this software that I will just simply start using my account at my own instance from now on.
Reasons why I chose it include:
- Portability, especially with SQLite database it is easy to backup and move to somewhere else
- Easy to upgrade, just stop the service, extract a tarball, check configuration changes and start the service
- Configuration is easy and I like the backend-first approach anyway, which makes GoToSocial lightweight unlike setting up Pleroma which I tried hosting, but didn’t like it
- As with all self-hosted projects, it’s between free to cheap to maintain and gives control of data back to you