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Illegible Club: a Mastodon instance for friends

Published on Jan 16th, 2025.

tl;dr: I just set up illegible.club, a Mastodon instance for friends (both online and in real life) to have a soft landing pad to join and experiment with the Fediverse. If you know me and want to try it out, send me a text or email and I can get you set up.

Soooo I’m taking another stab at running a Mastodon server. A few reasons for giving this another go:

  1. I’ve talked with friends about how Mastodon is a great alternative to corporate social media for a long time. Many times the conversation ends with “cool well how do I join?” At that point I realize how complicated it can be to find a good instance to join and change the subject 😅.
  2. It seems like the big social media companies are going even further off the rails than I ever thought they could. Now is as good a time as any to offer an off-ramp for those who are open to trying alternatives.
  3. I believe everybody deserves a better online experience than what corporate social media platforms are currently offering and, thanks to my knowledge of running internet infrastructure, am uniquely positioned to do something about it.

Compared to my previous attempt at running hackny.social, this time around I’m going to be starting an instance with its own identity rather than trying to bolt one onto an existing community. I had a modest amount of success with getting people to sign up on my last go but ran into a couple of critical issues that caused it to flop.

The first is that using the hackNY name restricted the instance to those who were accepted into the hackNY fellowship. The alumni base is a non-trivial pool of people, but the subset of hackNY alums also interested in participating on Mastodon was too small to bootstrap a community with.

The second issue was the branding. Suffixing everybody’s handle with @hackny.social came with an implied necessity of acting somewhat professional. hackNY is a hybrid social/professional community, but in public settings we tend to act more professionally to maintain the reputation of the organization. This ended up being pretty stifling in a social media environment, where people (including myself) wanted to express our goofball sides but felt like we couldn’t.

Lessons hard learned, but valuable ones nonetheless. Two years later I’m giving this another go with a new instance: illegible.club. It’s a homage to James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, whose ideas I’ve gushed over previously on this blog. My aim is to lower the cost of entry for friends to join the Fediverse by offering an easy answer to the question of “what instance do I join?” Mastodon requires a lot of work to achieve “escape velocity;” that is, to derive enough value from to be motivated to stick around and participate. My hope is that I can alleviate this by building a tight-knit community where everybody is at most two degrees of separation from other members.

Easier said than done, so we’ll see how this goes for me.

If you’re a friend of mine and want in on the action, feel free to reach out to me via email or text for an invite. I’d love to welcome you aboard and show you around.

For others reading this and pondering the idea of doing something similar, I’d highly recommend checking out runyourown.social, a great resource from Darius Kazemi which describes the ins and outs of running an online community for friends. You can also feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about how I’ve set up Illegible Club’s instance.