🎺.☕️ ANNOUNCEMENT:

I will be upgrading toot.cafe tonight to a beefier instance, and then I will open up registrations again tomorrow so that more friends can join.

My goal is to reach something around 600-1000 people. If we mostly get JavaScript/Node/web/etc folks and that becomes the culture, then great, but I'm also open to just allowing whoever in.

My main goal is that we reach a critical mass where it's a bit easier for newbies to get started. Small instances are a tad lonely.

And for those worried about cost, I'm paying like $80 per months right now, which is totally fine with me since I just love Mastodon and want to spread it to new people.

That's less than my T-Mobile bill, and also only half the cost of my stupid web projects on AWS that are years old and serve little purpose other than vanity. So… yeah it's worth it to me.

But I may ask for donations later as we scale up. Happy to take them if you like toot.cafe. ❤️

@nolan An instance of my kind of people 😮

@nolan an instance for web /JS folks? I'd join that in a heartbeat... except I'm already on some tech oss instance (which is great btw)

is it me or is the instance-as-network a bit of a wrong abstraction?

I have many interests. selecting an instance based on one of my interests seems... off.

I'd rather select an instance for its performance, reliability, longevity, moderation and trust factors.

And I should be able to join with interest-based sub-networks regardless of instance.

@teleclimber I kind of came to the same conclusion as you. I'm not sure how valuable an instance is for unifying people based on a shared interest, but I think it could be valuable if they're unified based on *pre-existing connections*

Somehow I convinced a lot of my awesome colleagues in the JavaScript/web/open-source/etc community to join this instance, and a bunch of us already know each other and so it feels easier to enforce norms, choose a good CoC, etc.

@teleclimber BTW I will probably open up registrations again tomorrow, check my birdsite (nolanlawson) for updates.
@nolan Yes I agree that having people with a common background and goal on the instance would be very helpful for anything that affects the entire community, like CoC, moderation, etc..