Today is a weird day. First I read about Snikket (in a HN comment I guess), which sounds pretty awesome - a curated set of tools for XMPP (i.e. server, web client, iOS + Android client) that are deliberately modified to work well together, just as it should've been from the start, and not everyone using different extensions and interacting being so painful at times... But for me this is like 5-8 years too late and I'm probably not going back to XMPP, I'm happy on Matrix for a certain set of people and I guess I lost contact with the ones on Jabber years ago anyway, or it's via Twitter or IRC or sometimes WhatsApp...
Then the news broke that Elon Musk is buying Twitter and for some reason there was a huge renewed interest in the fediverse again and the bigger servers seemed to be fighting with capacity a little. And by "for some reason" I meant that nothing actually has changed, it's just some event where everyone seems to get an impulse to check it out. I'm not saying that as a completely remote observer though, I did indeed log in to my fediverse accounts for the first time in weeks, and before that it had been months. Anyway, we'll see how that will pan out, the fediverse has never worked out for me because none of the 200 people I follow were actually being active over there.
It doesn't help that many instances have gone away since 2018-2020 and so there are a lot of empty references in my following list which I should probably prune at some point, at least if I would be active.
Back in 2017 (I think) I actually tried self-hosting (on a domain I no longer own, so again part of the problem), but the setup for just one user was just so overly complex and the software still buggy (I think I tried Mastodon and Pleroma) that I just scrapped the attempt and went to chaos.social for German content and mastodon.social for English content - I've never been a fan of bilingual interactions on Twitter.
I am not sure the landscape of self-hosting is a lot better today, someone posted this list and half of the applications are either declared as unfinished/beta and/or have not seen an update in years, which wouldn't be a problem if they were a little more mature and finished, but none of them look like it. So maybe I'll be trying out honk or ktistec.
And then I saw Blog more, tweet less and remembered my attemps to add IndiePub support into this site. Maybe I should just try to add something regarding ActivityPub and have the canonical source and then publish to either Twitter or the Fediverse... But oh well, does it actually matter? I put my Twitter account to private months (or years?) ago, I only have 150 people there, I haven't counted how many of those accounts are still active and so on, so "do I actually have any benefits besides appeasing FOMO" is a real concern. Self-hosting is nice, but not for the sake of it, the tool should have a purpose. And maybe this is something where I'm better off just using someone else's infra because it's just not important enough for me.
Also there are some valid concerns, mostly related to piggybacking on other people's instances, but the problem (see above) of just hosting your own persists. Maybe I should read Run your own social again, but I'm not sure there's anything new I haven't thought about.
Maybe this sounded like random rambling about unrelated topics but the gist of it is that I've been thinking about the communication channels I have used and am using quite a bit and for several of them I've never been really happy. The question is if moving to the fediverse would change anything about that or if there's a need for something else yet again...