I enjoy using my own domains — though I rent a few too many! One of them, rrier.fr was originally purchased solely so I could use pc@rrier.fr as my E-mail address.
Naturally, I wanted to also be known as @pc@rrier.fr on the Fediverse, as part of owning my online identity. Unfortunately, this turned out more challenging that I expected. Here are a few approaches I tried and what I learned along the way.
Forwarding WebFinger
My first approach, documented during my migration to xmit.co, was to set up a WebFinger redirect. https://rrier.fr/.well-known/webfinger redirected to https://mastodon.social/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct%3Apcarrier%40mastodon.social, the WebFinger URL for @pcarrier@mastodon.social.
This let people search for @pc@rrier.fr and find an account. Unfortunately, that indirection would be resolved right there and then: they would then see and follow the mastodon.social account. I couldn't move providers smoothly, as the process to relocate an account disappears all previous content.
I wanted more control over where my content is hosted and stored authoritatively. Onto what seemed like the natural solution.
Running Mastodon
In my opinion, for a single customer, a server requires too much setup and maintenance work, and too many resources. I gave up a few steps into an installation when I realized the amount of memory my VPS would probably need, so I can't say much more.
I looked around, and found what I think is a better solution for my needs:
Running GoToSocial
Setup was a breeze. Everything is lightweight and fast. I have minor complaints, notably lack of edit capability (already on the roadmap), but it's a fantastic piece of software.
It does, however, suffer from what appears to be limitations inherent to the design of the Fediverse:
My instance is federated with over 2000 other instances, but I don't see their content when looking up or following a hashtag. It only finds stuff that already appeared in the timeline of my lone user… Makes following hashtags pointless, something that I found super valuable when I was on a big instance.Edit: Unfortunately not supported by GoToSocial, relays are a solution to this problem. A tad cumbersome (either hashtag-specific and I need to administer their list whenever (un)following hashtags, or extreme overhead). Thanks Fedi Jedi for the tip!I can't boost or reply to toots of people I don't already follow, unless they were boosted by the accounts my instance follows… Following them doesn't backfill their history on my instance, so the existing toot remains out of reach.Edit: Search the toot by URL in your client to reach it. Not intuitive to me, but simple. Thanks Aaron Parecki for the tip!
I'd love to learn that those issues can be addressed without protocol changes, or that such protocol changes are underway. In the meantime, I've learnt to live with those grievances. Edit: Not a great UX, but everything seems workable in the end.