After more than half a decade (6+ years), Mastodon.technology is shutting down. The reason? One person is responsible (Ash Furrow) and they’ve hit their limit personally and technically.

A member of my family was very recently diagnosed with a terminal illness. I am doing everything I can to support them.

Last week, with yet more Elon Musk and Twitter news, the fediverse generally experienced extra traffic with an influx of new users. I woke up to mastodon.technology downtime alerts. In the midst of supporting my family, I had to ssh into a server and fiddle with settings.

I am exhausted.

The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I’ve always been keen to learn the next new skill I need to be an effective admin. But I just don’t have it in me anymore. The monitoring that I have in place is insufficient to solve the current problems and I have zero bandwidth to invest in learning the skills to diagnose and fix the issue.

Ages ago (4 years) we talked with Eugen Rochko on The Changelog (the creator of Mastodon) about the “absolute freedom in how people can run their servers,” and how the “incentives are usually ideological” when running a Mastodon server.

Yes, we talked about the costs of running a server, but from my recollection that seemed to be purely from a monetary perspective. The costs of running a server are also quite time intensive and those costs needs to be factored in as well.