I’m ready to completely jump in to using decentralized, federated platforms, however most people I know aren’t fully there. It strikes me that this moment in time, where a lot of people are newly actively aware and frustrated by Meta and Twitter’s actions, is ideal to get people to switch over to new platforms.

To encourage people in my community to join platforms on the Fediverse, I want to host instances of various platforms (probably Mastodon and Pixelfed to start with). Having a specific instance on these platforms to point people towards would probably help a lot of the folks I know get on board.

However, I’m scared I’m not knowledgeable enough to admin these public instances for others. I know some basic networking, I self-host a bunch of stuff with Docker on an old laptop, and I definitely am smart enough to figure out how to start up instances of these platforms. However, I’m mostly concerned with whether I’d be able to properly maintain and secure these instances. I wouldn’t want people to be soured on decentralized social media just because I don’t know what I’m doing.

Any thoughts, words of encouragement, tips, warnings, etc. are welcomed!