My own corner of the Fediverse

I joined Mastodon in 2019, and right off the bat, I was very intrigued by the possibility of running your own instance under your own domain. I originally wanted to setup an instance for A Possible Space, similar to what Panic or Tapbots have done. This didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, and soon enough I found an instance after my own heart: Merveilles, a wonderful community of thoughtful and creative people. Merveilles has been my social media home for the following seven years, but, as I became more serious about self-hosting (including this very website, as well as Parts), running a single-user instance of my own started to become more appealing again. It took me a long time to figure out how to do this, because my server runs OpenBSD (big shout out to my host, OpenBSD Amsterdam!), which means I cannot use Docker1 and therefore cannot easily run Mastodon. Not that I’d have wanted to do that: Mastodon is pretty infrastructure-heavy, and is designed for multiuser instances. I…