On October 28th of 2022 I created an account with Masto.host for hosting a Mastodon instance. The intention at this time was to create a Twitter-like space for the Wheel of Time fandom which was so active on Twitter at this time. With Elon Musk taking ownership of Twitter, I and many others suspected that things would go poorly with the social media platform under his management.
As of tonight, November 17th, the latest Twitter news is that the remaining Twitter employees (after layoffs and firings) have had their employee badge and building access disabled, and that entire engineering teams have chosen to resign rather than sign-on to the weirdly vague demands of Musk. This has spurred the latest of a series of waves of sign-ups on Darkfriend Social, bringing us to to a total of 77 users at writing.
In the time that the server has been up, I have been considering the best method for discussing updates and changes to the server itself. While the character limit Mastodon is higher than it is on Twitter, it is not (on our instance) long enough to really allow for long-form writing such as this post. So I decided that this site, my personal blog, may be the best place for those sorts of updates.
On that topic, I have also created a form here for Darkfriend Social members to volunteer to serve as a moderator for the server. Hoping that the server continues to grow and users continue to expand their use of Mastodon, there will inevitably be a need for more moderators beyond myself. I really consider this ideal, as I do not want to be the final arbiter. We have a great community, but community moderation is often a thankless job that is easiest when more people understand what goes into it.
The Mastodon Moderator form can be found on the Mastodon category page.