New perk for subscribers

I'm pleased to announce that the Mastodon instance I've been running for myself in the last few months is now going to be open to all past and present Patreon supporters!

It's a general purpose instance with memorable domain name: r.town

Just like bird.makeup, it is powered by 100% renewable energy. They are cohosted together in the hydro electricity-rich Québec where I'm from.

And of course, my other fediverse projects, like bird.makeup, are never going to be blocked, so will never wake up with your followings gone overnight because of a ban. But don't think this is going to be an unmoderated instance! I'm not interested in hosting hate speech. It simply mean I will favor silencing over banning other instances.

What I want to build with it

I'm eager to have other fediverse projects that are not dependant on elon's whims and having a medium sized mastodon instance opens the door to many interesting projects, such as:

- recommendation systems (for posts and followers)

- Collaborate with other open-source projects for anti-spam, such as with the new sourcehut anti-spam project

- search improvements for small and medium instances using only Postgres instead of elastic search

- Having this instance be only for Patreon subscribers, it will allow me to know more precisely which accounts out of the currently 122k followed that are the most important to my subscribers, and prioritize those. 

- I'd love to get into technical writing, and I want to write blog posts about building those features for a medium-sized instance, using my experience and anonymized public data from it

And of course making all those projects open source and sending code upstream if possible. 

How to start using it:

1. Sign up on r.town

2. DM me here on Patreon with your username

3. I'll activate it and you will be good to go. You can start fresh or import your existing account