So uh, apparently $288/year is not enough to run a Mastodon service for ~3 users, and this is a known issue (masto.host/mastodon-content-retention-se…) with no solution (github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions…!
Mar 20, 2026 at 4:09 PM
Mastodon is for the people
How we're thinking about supporting the communities that rely on Mastodon every day.
Mastodon Status Check
My social-media life has been Fediverse-first for a year now. I stick my head into Bluesky and Threads regularly, but visit Twitter rarely if at all. This piece takes a close look at Mastodon-land as things stand in late summer 2023. What’s working, what’s not, what are the alternatives? [Originally published August 2023, updated November 27th for my one-year Twitter-exit anniversary.]
It’s Not Just Mastodon
2025 Fediverse Needs Assessment: Moderation Across the Social Web The Fediverse is more than Mastodon, and moderation is bigger than any one platform. Last year, we heard from moderators on Mastodo…
Mastodon Starter Packs
Mastodon Starter Packs – Get Your Feeds Humming One of the most common complaints new users have with Mastodon is that initially their feed is dead because there is no algorithm here and they…
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Exit to Community: A Community Primer
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Mastodon instance mstdn.plus with over 4K users suddenly broke
Does it matter which Mastodon instance you choose? I've seen many people claim that it doesn't matter, and moreover that you can easily switch instances. I learned the hard way that this claim is unwarranted, a disservice to new Mastodon users. Your choice of instance is important, indeed crucial. Until yesterday I was on mstdn.plus, a Mastodon instance with well over 4000 active users according to its server stats. Yesterday morning I woke to a "frozen" timeline. At some point my home timeline stopped showing new posts. I stopped receiving new notifications too. My desolate experience was the same on the web site and in several third-party Mastodon client apps that I have installed on various devices. It turned out that my own experience was far from unique: looking at the federated timeline of mstdn.plus, at a certain point all posts from other Mastodon instances stopped, leaving only posts from local users. The last post from another instance was at 07:45 UTC on January 30, 2023. In the local mstdn.plus posts that appeared afterward, I saw a number of users complaining about frozen home timelines and missing notifications. (It was difficult to have conversations with them, because we weren't getting notifications for each other's replies.) Clearly, the entire instance was now severely dysfunctional.
How Does Mastodon Work? - Kev Quirk
I’ve spoken about Mastodon numerous times on this blog. It is the social media platform I use more than any other, but for a new user it can be confusing because it doesn’t work like other social media sites.
Cage the Mastodon
A year ago I wrote about Mastodon’s improvements over Twitter’s lacking protections against abuse and harassment. Development in that area has not been standing still, and it’s about time we do another comparison.
Enable Mastodon Apps Plugin — WordPress.com
Despite Mastodon implying that you would use this plugin for engaging on Mastodon (when you have enabled it for that, see below), the plugin is useful when installed on a plain WordPress.
So uh, apparently $288/year is not enough to run a Mastodon service for ~3 users, and this is a known issue (masto.host/mastodon-content-retention-se…) with no solution (github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions…!
Tried building on Mastodon, wasn't financially viable. There's extremely little will to pay people for work in the fediverse, and Mastodon couldn't even give credit to contributors to help them raise their own profile. The only Fediverse orgs that have paid me are IFTAS and Nivenly.
Pedro Vezza
Why did you decide to bet on atproto over Mastodon or similar?
