moth.zone and starting a friendly Fedi instance

I recently moved from karkatdyinginagluetrap.com to moth.zone. This is for a few reasons:

  1. karkatdyinginagluetrap.com was getting lonely, as nobody else who had signed up for it had been active
  2. I signed up to moth.zone for a “second account” but it slowly became my main :P
  3. Honestly? Running your own Mastodon instance is kind of expensive, sometimes.
  4. moth.zone is run by a set of cool friends of mine, so it would be pretty economical to just go on theirs.
  5. Akkoma is better than Mastodon. There, I said it.

I have been happy with being on moth.zone, if not for a few hiccups for some reason. I've been able to retain (most of) my friends (mastodon.art is blocked, and I think that's rightfully so), and I agree completely with the admins. This is the good thing with starting or joining a friends-only or friendly instance – you can communicate with the admins respectfully, because they're basically equals. They're quite literally your friends! Having an ecosystem that can listen to each other and grow and adapt is the best kind of ecosystem. The fact that I can go to @root@moth.zone and just say “hey, actually the mastodon.art admins aren't that bad” and have a good conversation about how I've gone fucking insane that is pretty dope, even if we're literally conversing about an instance moth.zone has blocked.

KKDIAGT

karkatdyinginagluetrap.com is also another good example of a friends-only instance, but it flopped quite depressingly, and I'd like to mention that. Sometimes you do start a instance for your friends and it ends up barren and empty – that's OK! If your friends don't like the Fediverse, that's completely fine. You could also try different instance engines, or just leave your friends alone, invite new ones, or join another friendly instance and participate there (maybe you could even make some new friends)! Whatever you do is fine. You can even get some of your friends onto the new instance (within admin permission) and re-create the old instance within the new one!

Avoiding big instances

One thing I'd avoid are very big instances. Steer clear of instances larger than 100 or so members and/or have open registration, because at that point, the admin has to do a lot of heavy lifting and make sure everyone's playing nicely, which makes the community a lot less tight-knit.

mastodon.* instances, like mastodon.art, mastodon.social, mastodon.online, mstdn.io, mstdn.jp are very good examples of this. These types of instances are known for moderation struggle and user bribing (mastodon.art is quite notable for user bribing when it came to the whole The Bad Space situation).