About m.onl (MainToot)

MainToot (m.onl) is basically my vision for a future with Mastodon. Mastodon has been around for a couple of years but has recently started gaining more traction because people are flooding it as an alternative to Twitter.

Many things that make Mastodon great (decentralization, freedom of speech, no algorithms) also make it less usable than other centralized platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram).

That's why MainToot is great for many, but not for everyone. We'll focus on adding features that make sense to most, like contact discoverability, identity verification, snappy user experience, etc.

We have some limits in place to prevent a mass flood of users in one go, so you may need to wait a couple hours/days when you try to sign up.

Our guarantees (loosely based on the convenant)

1. We'll never lock you into our instance. Even if we suspend your account, we'll provide you with a way to migrate to another instance.
2. We make several backups of your data. We back up our entire site 4x a day and keep a history of ~ 2 weeks. Backups are also stored offsite.
3. There's more than one SRE. I'm not running m.onl alone. Some of my engineering friends can jump in if necessary.
4. We'll provide a grace period of at least 1 month, should we decide to stop hosting m.onl. So you have the time to find a new home in the Fediverse.

Key principles

This explains why we're hosting another instance.

1. m.onl should be a safe space to discover, share and interact with content. It'll be moderated strictly, probably more strictly than other instances.
2. Our instance is meant to be great for most, not for all. We'll focus on general stuff that improves user experience rather than niche features. Mastodon tries to be different from "mainstream" social media platforms, but we'll try to add some of the features you're probably used to our instance. Like;
3. Easy login & signup: use your Apple account or another social account (coming soon).
4. Fast user experience. We use caching on multiple levels, a CDN, scalable hosting, etc. It's boring stuff but makes your experience better.
5. Will probably be paid. You can now sign up for free and use all features however you like. But if the user base rises, we will probably make the instance paid at some point (already registered accounts will remain free for > 6 months).

This is on our roadmap

Some things we're eager to add. The stuff here may or may not be built, but it also gives a general idea of what we're thinking.

1. Automated moderation. We'll automatically flag posts or suspend accounts if they abuse the service. There are some snags to overcome, but it's impossible to manually moderate millions of posts.
2. Contact discovery: basically, "find your friends."
3. Identity verification. We'd like to be a safe space. Knowing who you're talking to helps.