Julia Evans (@bork@jvns.ca) writes about her experience of running and using a single-person Mastodon server. The post also links to other people’s experiences in-between.
I did it for a while. Not exactly single person because my wife also wanted on. What I learned after a month or so is that it's worth paying someone 5 a month to do it for me since there were always something small breaking over a tiny bit of documentation not covered in the official instructions (I added to the official docs later).
I recommend everyone do it at least once if you have the background. It teaches you a lot about the process.
Would you recommend running another Fediverse microblogging software like Pleroma or Calckey? They can use/interact with all Mastodon features just fine. The issues you found…were they Mastodon-specific or Fediverse/ActivityPub in general?
The issues were mastodon related not fediverse related. Activitypub worked great! And it was only on my personal server at the time a couple of years ago.
just curious what things were breaking? I've been running my own instance for around 8 months now and apart from updating it every month or so I've had no issues.
For me, I didn't have all that much space so the daily cache was filling up quite fast. At the time, there were also libraries that you had to get that were not mentioned in the official install instructions. I found out what to do on a random discord later on. I added the additional install instructions for future people to not be confused.