The news cycle has been filled recently with Twitter. People have been leaving for the Fediverse, mainly joining instances running Mastodon (see “Mastodon and the Fediverse: Beginners Start Here” for more details on the Fediverse and Mastodon). That’s been great, but it’s also been a struggle as instances try to absorb the crush of new people.
One of our goals at Empathy Forward is to support long-term projects that benefit society. Part of that is helping make communities resilient, which requires distributed systems (see “Graceful Degradation of Infrastructure” for more thoughts). The Fediverse is such a distributed system.
Our values are shown by our actions rather than our words (though what we say might give loud hints at what our values might be). So it’s not enough to say that we support distributed systems. Instead, we need to act when and where we can.
Setting up a Mastodon instance is pretty straightforward for those familiar with managing computer systems. So that’s what we did. Back in May, 2022, we created BeneHomini.Social, reflecting the name we were working with at the time (Bene Homini, or “doing right by each person”). We’ve been running it since then, recently transitioning hosting from Amazon Web Services to Mastohost.
The instance isn’t focused on this organization or its mission, though conversations about that are welcome and encouraged. It’s meant to put our money where our mouth is. Anyone is welcome as long as they are civil. Read the server rules for details.
By the way, if you’d like to contribute to the operating costs of running BeneHomini.Social, please consider donating. More of your contributions go towards our costs than if we used a site like Patreon.
