In retrospect the part of social media I enjoy is having fun, and I don't have that much fun here.

My intent with running this instance was to explore the fediverse, boycott twitter, and try to make a landing space for my friends so they could make the jump too.

The dominant culture of the fediverse is absolutely not one that meshes with my ideological affinities. The mainstream here really does just feel like a lib version of truth.social .

Unfortunately the way moderation and federation here works all feels like a weird form of collective punishment that really just harms the end users.

Moderating my instance was easy, but it still felt bad because my only rule is "hey don't be a dick" and telling friends they're being dicks (lest our entire instance get defederated) isn't really what I signed up to do, but that's on me for being naive.

Feels silly that the straw that broke the camel's back was a new software release, but yeah I just don't wanna maintain this shit.

Last month I bumped up the resources on my VM so that sidekiq wouldn't crash due to OOM every 8 hours, filling up the queues, causing 2hr delays in viewing and posting toots, and causing assloads of 500 errors.

That caused me to pay 5 dollars for a month of this. Up from 9¢ the previous 2 months. This proved too much of an investment for me.