There were ways to make it clear that it was insecure that didn’t alienate an arguable majority of their casual userbase.

That was a pretty wild decision

This was my first thought. I’ve never said “self hosted” to a client and, honestly, never would. “On-prem” or “Running on your server.” The idea of a company “self hosting” something is literally just “hosting”.

I run a mastodon instance in docker and a Sharkey instance in docker on another server. I, personally, didn’t find it especially temperamental but, to be fair, I have pretty extensive experience troubleshooting Docker issues re: networking/permissions/volumes because I am cataclysmically unclever.

Some advice: I would definitely recommend against running it on a naked domain you care about (i.e. instance.com). Always deploy it on a subdomain (i.e. mastodon.instance.com) because, if you ever change servers, have to re-make your intance, have domain issues, etc, you will be fucked pretty much forever on that domain. On a subdomain, you can just use a different subdomain.

I had assumed beehaw had already defeded. Since I’ve been using lemmy, there has never not been some discussion about beehaw and their federation/defederation choices and discussing the intricacies of those decisions. For whatever reason, I haven’t really seen anything from or about beehaw since joining this instance so I presumed they defeded. Prior to that, it seemed hit or miss whether or not I’d get the privilege of seeing beehaw.

All that is to say, with the way you’ve handled moderation, if you left the fediverse it would probably just make everyone’s lives simpler. It’s going to be a “shit or get off the pot” from me, dawg.

Gr8 b8 m8