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.

If you’ve been following along, or probably not, since none of this is live yet, I’ve been moving some of my random old sites over to static hosting to simplify life. Static hosting doesn’t solve everything, and doesn’t protect your cheese, but it’s cheap & carefree (at least, until your hoster deprecates their static hosting). Finding new places to put static hosting is pretty straightforward too. I use Firebase static hosting for this site at the moment, that’s what this post covers.