While it’s cool to host your own Mastodon server, it’s not really efficient. A simple thing you can do, however, is to make it easier for others to discover your presence, if they already know your website. Try it out – search for “johnmu@johnmu.com” in your Mastodon instance. Also, click “follow” for SEO tips & other bad takes. Why is hosting your own instance inefficient? In short, sending updates between users (followers, followees) means connections between their individual servers, and if everyone has their own server, it’s a lot of network activity.

Now that Mastodon is more of a thing, I thought I’d set up a static embed of Mastadon posts within Hugo, similar to what I did for Twitter posts. With the static embedding, I wanted to remove all requirements for JavaScript, and remove all third-party requests on behalf of the users here. In short, this speeds things up, and saves you from worrying about cookies & tracking, or needing to make exceptions to the site’s CSP.