Mental Health

Technical Operational Stress

I've found the stress of having to maintain an instance to have a negative effect on my mental health, and requires a lot of time and resources to manage it.

Consider getting an ops team. Share the load.

Also, if you are a single operator/admin of an instance, please write a guide and share your SSH key with Shamir's Secret Sharing or similar (this splits your document into pieces, and requires multiple pieces to rebuild it). In the unfortunate situation you find yourself dead or even on holiday, you might require the key to be rebuilt.

My plan is to write documentation on my instance and give this to a bunch of different instance admins in my region whom I have a strong community trust in... I'll give out 5 parts and require 3 to rebuild (in case somebody loses their piece). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing

Moderation Stress

Moderation sucks. It's depressing because the core reason it exists is to react and be an arbiter to the worse sides of the fediverse. People are not reporting good vibes and fun jokes.

You see the worse in people, and sometimes the reports are tramatic. Share the load and try not to dedicate yourself to both technical and moderation tasks.

It's also important to build a community of mods which share your instances and personal values. These people will speak for you. They will make decisions without you, and you need to trust them.