Raspberry Pi creates its own Mastodon server -- running on a Raspberry Pi 4
Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, and he's been doing a terrible job of running things. He made the verification status confusing and nonsensical, but worst of all, he quickly fired thousands of workers. And so, many Twitter users have been abandoning the platform and switching to alternatives. You can find yours truly on Mastodon, for instance.
The folks over at Raspberry Pi are not abandoning Twitter (yet), but they are very alarmed by Musk's erratic behavior. As a result, they have created an account on the Mastodon social network in case they do decide to jump ship. Actually, they took things a step further and have begun running their own Mastodon server (also known as an "instance") at raspberrypi.social.
Speaking on their concerns over Elon Musk's handling of Twitter, Alasdair Allan, Head of Documentation at Raspberry Pi shares the following statement.
Last week, Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a kitchen sink, and within hours he had laid off half of Twitter’s staff. The lawsuits, then rehiring, started almost immediately afterwards. With the content moderation team cut to the bone, anecdotally at least, folks also started to see an uptick in abuse, spam, and other things. The changes in the way verification is going to work are worrying, and confusing. There are even discussions ongoing about putting the entire site behind a paywall.
That’s a lot of change in a short amount of time. So if you no longer feel like Twitter is a place to be, as some celebrities and academics have already, then you can now also follow us over on Mastodon.
As you can imagine, this Mastodon instance is running on a Raspberry Pi 4. But no, they aren't running the server on one of their own devices in the office. Instead, it is being hosted on what they call a "Pi in the sky." In other words, the server is in the cloud, but make no mistake, it is running on an actual Pi 4 hardware -- just hosted by a company called Mythic Beasts.
If you want to learn more about Raspberry Pi's decision, including worries over Musk and details about running the Mastodon instance, you can read the full blog post here. You can check out the official Raspberry Pi Mastodon account here.
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