Add another one to the pile labelled "Finally": Kodsnack now has its own Mastodon account.
(Synk too!)
The hangup was always the classic Mastodon issue of which instance to create the account on. A personal account is one thing, but one representing a podcast for some reason felt like it might be viewed differently by admins and instance rules.
Being developers, we have of course discussed setting up our own instance to host the Kodsnack account. But maintaining Mastodon seems to be a bit of a project - bordering on both art and profession - of its own, with storage management and upgrades and background worker processes and more. All this, and you have not even got to actual handling of users, accounts, and the like.
For once, I actually landed right on the grownup solution when a sudden impulse propelled me into action: I threw a very small amount of money at the problem and let Mastohost solve the issue for us. They offer completely managed hosting, and a helpful interface which makes the setup process as easy as can be. I did refer a bit to Stammy's Mastodon hosting guide before starting, but all the information I needed was also available in the interface right when I needed it. Very good job, Mastohost!
This by the way included which DNS settings you needeed to make, how to make them, and a very cool live updating status page. It first verified your DNS settings, then automatically set up your instance once the updated settings had propagated.
The only thing left for me to do was create a few accounts, fill in a little bit of server and user information, and lock the thing down so that nobody else can create accounts. Supporting a server where things like moderation might become an issue is a whole different adventure I will think very carefully about for a long time before I decide not to embark upon it.
In all, the whole process was smoother than expected, and it is fun to have some additonal accounts to play around with in my client apps. Client apps also become quite a bit more convenient when you have multiple accounts on the same server that you want to check. With multiple servers, it is not a problem to have them open in different browser tabs, but switching between ones on the same server means either juggling browsers or profiles or other isolation methods, or a lot of logging in and out.
Come to think of it, I should add my podcastindex.social account as well. Have not looked at that one in a long time …
… not much to see there, good thing I was not missing out.
Now, all I need to do is:
- Post stuff in the right places
- Not get caught up in posting and reading stuff all the time
- (Not play with admin settings and watch admin charts I do not understand)
Perhaps this is a suitable moment to read a few pages, then?
(A fun bonus achievement is that all domain names I own are now actually in meaningful use. Did not see that one coming.)