You Should Run Your Social Media (Moving to Mastodon)
We know the story. The trans community sets up shop somewhere, that somewhere starts to thrive from the enormous amount of unique content produced by trans people, people who hate, harass, and stalk trans people follow suit and join that somewhere - and then The Moderation Team has a choice - protect trans people or allow them harm from obvious bad actors.
Bluesky is the most recent iteration of this pattern. Instead of protecting trans people, Bluesky went all the way to the point of changing their rules so that they could protect known harassers of trans people.
With this said, the question many trans people are returning to is "Where do we go? We already left an other social media for this one, where can we go where this won't inevitably happen again?"
The answer, as you might've guessed from the title, is Mastodon - or, really any software that runs an instance connected to the "Fediverse" - The World's Worst Named Network. Just to keep it short: The Fediverse is the network of every server running "ActivityPub" - "ActivityPub" is a protocol for networking (for Bluesky folks it's like ATProtocol). Mastodon is the most well known software that runs ActivityPub, but there are many others, including Akkoma, Pleroma, Misskey, etc. But, for ease of use, and hate me as much as you want for this, i'm just going to refer to it all as "Mastodon". It's a better name than "Fediverse".
Why Mastodon?
Well, by owning your own space you make the rules. Mastodon has some of the best user controls for privacy. There are post-level controls, account-level controls and instance-level controls. Each post comes with individualized controls - posts are Public, Unlisted, Private (followers only) and on some instances there are even controls ("local-only") to stop your post from federating at all, so that it stays on the instance you posted it on, behind a login on your instance. Accounts also come with their own privacy settings - Locked and Public. With a public account anyone can follow you, and thus see your lock posts. With a locked account you have to accept the follow request for them to see your locked posts. Locked accounts can still post publicly, too! So, unlike twitter, locking your account doesn't mean you can't still have a voice in public conversations! And last but not least, Instance Owners have the ability to "defederate" their instance from other instances entirely. An incredibly severe way to prevent users on other instances from accessing your information. (Use with extreme caution, this is not for petty fights.)
Joining Mastodon should be easy. Pick a server and, if registration is open, make an account. But this hurdle alone is bigger than it seems. Mastodon Instances are the first feed you'll have access to when you join. And Instance Owners control what other instances they connect to. So, if you pick an instance and your friend happens to pick an instance that your instance owner banned, you won't be able to see their posts anymore. Or maybe you pick an instance and tomorrow that instance owner decides the instance costs too much for them to run and they close it down. These issues have returned again and again as mastodon has gone through influxes of new users. What I'd usually recommend to avoid those problems is users running their own instance. But this requires some amount of understanding of how to command-line your way through a linux machine while installing git repositories, which most users interested in trying out a new social media aren't willing to do. If you are willing to do that, this isn't the guide for you, and instead i recommend n00q's guide - i used it myself to set up my server, it is excellent.
(If you do not want to make your own instance and instead would like to join one of the communities currently existing, i will privately provide you with a list of servers i vouch for. email at the bottom of the page)
What those of us without command-line skills are looking for is Managed Hosting. There are two main Managed Hosting sites i recommend.
and
Both of these methods offer the option to use a domain name you own, or use a subdomain of your choosing on their domain. Bluesky's ability to set your username to a domain name you own has increased the number of people who own their own domain name. If you don't have one, use sites like NameCheap to buy one. If you do use your own domain name on either MastoHost or FediHost you're going to have to edit the "DNS" setting on whatever site you bought your domain through. If you use a subdomain of MastoHost or FediHost you won't have to edit this DNS setting.
And that's about it! Both of these sites make it incredibly easy to start up your own Instance for as little as 6 dollars!
Once you get your instance online, check this to learn more about your instance and what configuration powers you have!
wander
If you have any questions email me @ wander@nomadarchives.cc