@Sovereign I ended up going with masto.host cause it's all managed for you, it's like 6 bucks a month which is pretty reasonable and I don't have to do any admin work

I was up for the challenge and just wanted to learn more. Plus I'm poor and cheap lol. Still wild I was able to pull it off though. Hopefully more people follow our example and migrate away from large social media companies.

@Sovereign it's definitely a good learning experience, and it's really great that the bar to spinning up your own instance is fairly low. This is how the internet was originally meant to work. It was supposed to be lots of individual servers talking to each other, not a handful centralized platforms.

I still don't think most normies will be able to pull it off like I did. Although I'm not a networking expert, I'm still a lifelong PC user. ChatGPT was enough to get me over the hump but it isn't a idiot proof guide. Maybe in a few years LLMs will be advanced enough that literally anyone will be able to do the same. I'm still learning tricks on how to best run my instance as an admin.

@Sovereign yeah LLMs can be helpful in getting something going, I think services like masto.host becoming more common will help as well. I think a big aspect of it is whether people feel it's worth their time and money to self host.