In a previous post on mine from last year, I wrote about how Mastodon has given me a great sense of community, and I now feel significantly less alone online. However, I recently, yet again, changed where I call home on Mastodon. In this short post, I’ll go into where I’ve come from, deciding on where I went, and how I got there.

Leaving…

I didn’t want to leave my existing server, cutie.city, as I was happily set up there, loved my local feed, and enjoyed the large character limit and signifiant emojis. However, with Mastodon needing to be updated on a regular basis for security reasons, and having my admin absent the past few months, with these updates not being processed, I became a little nervous as to the future of my wonderful Mastodon home.

I began looking elsewhere for a couple of weeks before I eventually moved, but it was seeing a mutual on another server making a migration as their server was closing down, that made me take the leap and decide to move as well.

Where Next?

Funny enough, where the mutual was leaving was one of the places I was looking at, so I had to reconsider that as an option!

I knew I had a few requirements for my new home:

1. Large character limit
2. Lots of emojis
3. Active admin for regular software updates
4. Good moderation
5. A kind culture

I was also reluctant to go somewhere too big as I had become used to a small community, and didn’t want to be somewhere that federated with Threads.

After some consideration over a few servers, I ended up going where that mutual had also gone to: beige.party! I was thankfully accepted after submitting a request to join, and am now happily at the home of “friendly weirdos”, which is “definitely probably not a cult” 🙏

My only issue so far is how my new profile does not correctly link back to these website as verified, with no green tick showing that the Jessica on beige.party is me, unlike when I was at cutie.city which instantly worked and verified me. I will need to continue investigating this further…

Migration

Migrating to another server can seem scary, especially if not done before. However, the admin of cutie.city wrote a fantastic interactive guide on how to do this which I highly recommend to make the process as smooth as possible, wherever you are moving to or from. I managed to migrate everything over between accounts in one morning, though there was quite an avalanche of notifications of people following as the migration took place - remember to turn these off before you begin!