Mastodon removal

In a recent posting, I mentioned that my self-hosted Mastodon site was offline again, following yet another attempted (and failed) upgrade. This software has proven to be very challenging to keep stable and operational. Once it is running, it is great. But every time I have tried to update it due to patches or security releases, it has failed and had to be rebuilt. This ends up losing all the history, and I have to recreate accounts. End result is I waste a lot of time.

Over the last couple of years I have been making the attempt, literally no one has joined the server membership, so the good news is that the only one affected is myself. It also makes the decision to drop Mastodon much easier, since no one will miss it.

Note that this is not dropping off of Mastodon entirely, just the self-hosting option. I do still intend to use Mastodon but will set up an account (or migrate my old one if still possible) on another social groups hopefully more reliably maintained system. I likely will take a break from it until then though, so I have removed all the links on the website.