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Comment by jeena | Hacker News Reader

Why wouldn't you go to a open alternative like Mastodon instead to yet another silo?

I was on Mastodon for more than a year and loved it: great conversation that reminded me of the hope and promise of the Internet in the late 90's. Then my instance admin went AWOL, the site crashed, and all of my data and social graph were lost. I still can't get the admin to respond to emails. I could host my own server but who really has the technical know-how and time to do that kind of work? Mastodon has got to solve the reliability and/or portability problem. If I could have recovered my social graph on another instance, I would still be on the network.

Yeah part of the problem with Mastodon is trusting that you're instance will stick around. The only ways I can think to do that are:

1. Host it yourself

2. Use one of the paid instances backed by an established company (I use Librem Social)

Perhaps over time some ad supported Mastodon instances will pop up for those willing to pay that way.

You can start somewhere and then if you see that it doesn't stick around you can easily move your account to a different server and take all your followers with you, it's build into the software. In that sense it's even nicer than email where you need to tell everyone that you moved on to a different email-address manually.

I donated to the admin's Patreon account in excess of his hosting fees. But, that didn't cover his time, apparently. The admin is still active on GitHub after the server crashed; I guess he just lost interest.

Does mastodon have a tool that can create regular back ups to email to you??? Seems relevant for a common problem like this

On my instance I can (manually) request a backup every 7 days. It would be nice if this could be automated but it's all media etc. so it's quite big for email. If the admin would have announced that they would switch off the server you could have moved easily which is possible at least since v3.0

No, not currently.

I've contemplated hosting an instance of Mastodon. It doesn't quite have the features I'd like it to have.

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