@zonk @waifu @TheFediFiles yeah that was the first instance. I started it on my birthday. It lasted about a month before the Jews stole that domain from me.

That was my entrance into the fediverse.

I was bored and knew about mastodon from pawoo so I decided to try to set up my own instance. I wasn't doing anything with the domain and I thought it'd be funny. It came time to make my account and I thought @sjw@feminism.lgbt would be funny so that's where the handle came from.

I didn't expect to run it for more than two weeks before I got bored and moved on to something else but one thing lead to another.

My knowledge of Linux at the time was "if Ubuntu breaks wipe the system and start over."

However once people started entrusting me with their data I felt obligated to learn how to make sure it stayed safe.

A few months later I wiped the server and switched it to Arch (it was my first time ever installing Arch). I restored it from backups. In hindsight, I should have tested the backups but I just did it assuming they worked and I was right.

One time I accidently deleted the config file which had the private key for federation and I didn't have backups of it. My solution was to just grep the raw drive for some strings in the config file and once it flew past on the terminal I stopped it and just copied and pasted it back into the config file and everything was fine.

It taught me a lot about Linux and networking.