[zach43]

one of the coolest things about mastodon and pleroma is that you can just start your own instance and immediately federate with the rest of the network.

this means that if youre unhappy with the moderation in a community, if you want to own your own data/privacy, or if you want to use self-hosted software, you can just do that with mastodon.

a few weeks back i went through a pleroma guide and set up my own pleroma instance. it only took a few hours, and it has been running for over a month on a $5 Linode (1 GB RAM). i migrated from mastodon.social, and it carried over everyone i was following seamlessly.

i get that the whole decentralized thing has been blown out of proportion in the past, but in the fediverse (mastodon, pleroma, GNU social, etc) it is working quite well.