The old domain for this site was https://status.mastodonmusic.social and the new domain for this is https://mastodonmusic.stevetures.com. What's listed below the line break is an archive of what was discussed, just in case. Keeping it around is basically free so might as well. But it's all basically anachronistic as the server is gone so migration options are no longer possible.
Here's a handy list of music-oriented mastodon servers to browse or join:
or check out other servers to join at https://joinmastodon.org/servers or https://instances.social.
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July 2024 - I've decided to shut down mastodonmusic.social on 20 Oct 2024 (date per Mastodon covenant guidance). This should give everyone time to go figure out what they want to do with their data or give everyone a chance to migrate elsewhere.
Options
Migrate to another server.
Pick a server. The Mastodon application supports moving your info and data to a new location, which is pretty neat. There's a raft of great well-run servers now, with nice communities. Take a look at https://joinmastodon.org/servers or https://instances.social/ if you want some ideas on where to move.
For musicians, https://musicians.today/ or https://musicworld.social/ or https://musician.social/ are all good alternatives.
Create your account and make sure it gets approved if needed. Then add your current account@mastodonmusic.social as an alias at that new server. I think you also have to make an alias of the destination one at your source account too? Mine was a little fiddly until I had aliases for each account on both sides (i.e. alias on destination for source, and then source for destination). Also do note that it's probably not a good practice to either reuse your password from one site to another, or to type your source password into your destination server, which shouldn't be necessary anyways.
Head to https://mastodonmusic.social/settings/migration to provide mastodonmusic.social with your new Mastodon account name in the format account@server.domain .
Download your data.
You can do that in the Import / Export section of preferences on the server. https://mastodonmusic.social/settings/export
Do nothing. All this migration stuff is optional, though do note that once the server is down, migration options will no longer be available.
Reasons?
Well, I'm happy to talk about them. None of them are catastrophic, but they aren't what I would consider to be reversible. In other words, with respect, I'm not really open to debating these, but just leaving them here for historical reasons.
Mastodon is pretty messy to administer. It's a delightful hodgepodge of F/OSS technologies, which, ah, really takes some getting used to. Package hell can happen if you're not careful or you don't know what you're doing with your underlying OS. If I were to do it again, I'd probably do the docker version rather than running directly in the host OS's root partition (err well you get the idea). Every update is sort of a nail-biter as you worry you're gonna blow up something or that your backups, while they exist, aren't very well-tested. I'd probably very consciously set up a dev and prod instance if were to do it again, though that means more money. Also cost, wow $200+ a month on GCP, which is nicely available and comes with G's nice legal team to make sure that frivilous search requests are turned down, but wow also pricey. I can afford it, but this morning I found myself asking "why though"...
Doing it right means finding at least one or more other persons to trust. For this instance, it's always just been me rather than put my users at risk of someone I don't fully know having access. But if something were to happen to me, you all would be stuck, floating on a sinking ship with no security patches, no backup, no restore, no one paying the bills, etc. It would go badly pretty quickly. There's some moderation tools for allowing trust, but as for actual sysadmin work, you really have it being all or nothing on finding someone you trust both technically and morally, as well as have the time and inclination to help. I personally have a high bar for all of this trust, and so I worried a lot about the bus factor on my instance. I had friends who probably meet the technical and moral bar, but are busy people who already voiced their concerns just with the generic idea of owning a mastodon server. All the technical, moderation, administration, moral and legal questions are pretty hard to ignore. I basically just did it anyways and ignored parts like the technical (timely patching), moderation (wow moderating trends is a PITA and I didn't want to come up with fairness standards for topics, so basically didn't even do the work) and legal (do I register with DMCA? what do I do if someone sends me a legal letter?).
Probably the happiest reason for this is part of why I started this instance, was that the Mastodon community was in bad shape in late 2022, and it was particularly bad for musicians. There wasn't instance that was functional that had the string "music" in the server name, which is what made me say "well dammit, guess I'll have to make one". Additionally, all of the popular instances were melting, and I felt like helping out. These days, things are a lot better, with shared moderation lists to ban terrible instances, better guard against spammers, regular patching, more people than just Eugen working on Mastodon (!!), great moderators, well-run large instances, integrations with other services like Threads (for better or worse, I do hope they figure out what to do around moderation to make sure that Threads doesn't spoil the party once Threads users show up on Mastodon post / comment pages) and many many more things that are legitimately great. So I'm glad things are a lot better than they were 1.5 years ago.
(Also, get rekt Elon. While Twitter/X isn't gone, it sure seems like a spammy heinous wasteland with plenty of terrible people making the service bad every day. Turns out being terrible to others is bad for business, who knew?)
So there it is. Take care, and should the need and the motivation ever arise, I'll be here to help pitch in and do what I can for musicians. Musicians have had such a shitty run for the last couple decades, even with so many people loving and depending on music in their lives, I hope the world gets back to paying musicians fair amounts, and that touring endlessly isn't the only way for musicians to survive.
Just for future, if you need to contact me, I'll still happily be on Mastodon: https://mastodon.online/@stevetures
