Migrating to Hachyderm

As the trajectory of the bird site got clearer and nastier late last year I decided to migrate to the fediverse. I didn't want to end up on another platform controlled by a petulant tinpot dictator, so I decided to see if I could host my own ActivityPub server. Mastodon looked pretty intimidating, but GotoSocial is a smaller, lighter, program that (approximately) inter-operates with Mastodon (yay, federation!).

I ran that server for a couple of months, but eventually decided to shut it down and migrate to Hachyderm.io. I did this for a couple of reasons:

• GotoSocial ended up being the most resource-intensive thing running on my home-server, and the architecture of ActivityPub meant I was putting (proportionally) more load on other servers than I needed to. This isn't to say that GotoSocial was doing anything outlandish, but ActivityPub is a chatty protocol and I try to be mindful about spending compute.

• Hachyderm has an explicit governance structure, one developed by folks who know what they're doing a lot better than I do. Holding safe, communal online space seems like a really valuable skill, and I'll learn it better hanging out on a shared instance than I will in a private silo.

Atomizing all web hosting into parochial little home-servers isn't sustainable or desirable, and Hachyderm is a cool project blazing a different trail, so I made a donation to help pay for hosting and made the leap.

I had accumulated a pretty lovely feed of subscriptions, and that kept me locked in for a while, but the beauty of self-hosting is that I had the SQLite database with all my data in it, so I was able to figure out a procedure for migrating (which is described here).