Good Morning Friends! Surprised Josie is surprised that I am taking her photo. I figured since this is going to be a fairly light post this morning I would lead off with a cat photo and maybe even close with a cat photo. I’ve not really talked about it on my blog but late last year I was involved with the preparation and launch of a mastodon instance and said involvement went off the rails. As a result, I have not really had a default Mastodon instance to suggest to my friends. There are of course excellent sites run by Stux like Mastodon.coffee, Mstdn.social, and Masto.ai that I currently reside on, but there is just something different about having a nice focused local feed that you can rely on. Since most of my online interaction is with gaming-focused topics, it would be lovely to have a gaming-focused instance that did not have a shitbird for an administrator.
Back in 2019, during another wave of migrations from Twitter my friend Gazimoff founded MMORPG.social and it was a delightful place. You might know him better from his time spent writing for MMORPG.org or the ZAM Network… or even his intense involvement in the Wildstar community… or maybe the Mana Obscura blog. MMORPG.social was really cool but also of fairly limited focus… given that MMORPGs in general represent a pretty small slice of the total gaming public. Then there was the fact that a lot of lessons were learned in a rapid-fire succession about how best to build a Mastodon instance and be able to scale it with demand. While MMORPG.social was ultimately shuttered, lessons were learned about how to build a better community going forward and more than that how to make the entire site scale more sustainably.
Now we scan forward to yesterday when Gaz finally pulled back the curtain on his next venture. Gamepad.club is the result of that understanding gained back in 2019 and created to be a more general focus gaming instance rather than a niche devoted to MMORPGs. Essentially Gaz decided there was a need for a stable gaming-focused instance that could scale as needed and that had a steady hand. I am very happy to have an instance that I feel like I can wholeheartedly support and suggest to my friends. He is doing it right from the start and has signed on to the Mastodon Server Covenant that outlines some basic parameters for operating an instance. I’m not currently formally involved with the running of this instance in any way, because I decided it was probably best that I was not at least in the short term. I’m admittedly concerned that the vindictive admin of another gaming instance might take some sort of retaliatory action against Gamepad.club if I were.
I have however set up an account there and worked on my profile. I’ve not made the formal leap, but I am sure at some point in the coming weeks I will. I have a lot of faith in Gaz and the lessons that he learned while running MMORPG.social and how best to keep from running into any roadblocks with Gamepad.club. I think one of the huge benefits of the way it is configured is that it is not just another hosted instance on masto.host, and as a result, he can pivot and apply custom patches as needed rather than waiting for the entire hosted infrastructure to be updated at the same time. I plan on picking his brain on his experiences with Linode, because I have been deeply considering shifting all of my infrastructure to a self-managed cloud environment rather than the shared web hosting that I currently have.
I will close out this morning’s post with a picture of Josie and Gracie chilling on the sofa and actually getting along. Josie is not all that sure about her role as “Big Sister” and mostly gets annoyed by Gracie’s love and attention. Essentially my friends if you are looking for a more gaming-focused instance, then I highly suggest you check out Gamepad.club. It is still pretty small but I figure in the coming weeks it will grow into a lovely community, without any terribly onerous rules. Gaz is someone I trust and someone who has been a friend for years. I am very willing to put my faith in him when I migrate.