My own corner of the Fediverse
I joined Mastodon in 2019, and right off the bat, I was very intrigued by the possibility of running your own instance under your own domain. I originally wanted to setup an instance for A Possible Space, similar to what Panic or Tapbots have done. This didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, and soon enough I found an instance after my own heart: Merveilles, a wonderful community of thoughtful and creative people.
Merveilles has been my social media home for the following seven years, but, as I became more serious about self-hosting (including this very website, as well as Parts), running a single-user instance of my own started to become more appealing again.
It took me a long time to figure out how to do this, because my server runs OpenBSD (big shout out to my host, OpenBSD Amsterdam!), which means I cannot use Docker1 and therefore cannot easily run Mastodon. Not that I’d have wanted to do that: Mastodon is pretty infrastructure-heavy, and is designed for multiuser instances. I wanted something much more minimal, and settled on GoToSocial after having tried snac2 for a while.
GoToSocial is lightweight (a single Go binary) and designed with single-user instances in mind, so it was a perfect fit for my use case. However, it is not officially supported on OpenBSD because that platform lacks a WASM compiler. It does provide a “totally experimental, unsupported nowasm tag”, which is what I ended up using. I followed Joel Carnat’s excellent tutorial from 2025 to set everything up, which has worked really well for me. Thank you for putting it together, Joel!
So after seven years on Merveilles, I have redirected my account there to my new instance, and I can now be found on the Fediverse at @gosha@gosha.net. This one is, hopefully, for the long term. Please do follow!
Separately, I’m also very much enjoying that I’m getting more and more comfortable self-hosting services2, and I’m looking forward to expanding my portfolio in the future.