I had been thinking about doing this for a while, but setting up a Mastodon instance on your own from source is not exactly for the faint of heart – it requires setting up several services for storage, database, and the server itself, all of which need to be maintained. While I certainly could do it – I am a programmer by trade, after all; deploying software from source is something I do regularly – I didn’t want to have to do it. Much like with my website, I prefer to have it hosted & maintained for me.

As a relatively new service, there aren’t a lot of companies providing turn-key Mastodon hosting, but one I’ve had my eye on for a while now is Masto.host – and this is the one I decided to go with.

I am using my own domain (starkeith.net) for this instance, so I went with the domain name social.starkeith.net.

I am running what is technically known as a “single user instance,” which isn’t quite what Mastodon was intended for, but because I was migrating an existing account (along with all of the followers I’d gotten) it actually works out all right. I could add a few additional users without it being a problem, but for now it’s just me.

Because of the way federation works, your instance needs resources based on how active its users are – and of course “activity” includes being viewed/favorited/boosted by other users. So you need to plan for enough capacity in case, say, one of your posts goes viral and suddenly gets a whole bunch of attention. But on the flip side, you don’t want to pay for capacity that you don’t normally need, or else you’re wasting money.

I ended up going for the 2nd from the smallest plan – it’s very affordable, and given that it’s just me, the price is about the same as what I was donating to my previous Mastodon instance. If my account grows significantly, I can always increase my plan.

Overall, I’ve been extraordinarily happy with the results of having my own Mastodon instance – the hosting provider I use keeps the software up-to-date, and the performance has been great. There’s virtually no administration/moderation required when it’s just me, and there have been virtually no “randos” showing up in my mentions (which was easily handled by de-federating from some known bot-filled/spammy/abusive instances, and there have been zero problems since).

In fact, my experience with having my own instance has convinced me that basically anyone with a website should have their own Mastodon instance under their domain name – it’s so easy and convenient, there’s really no excuse not to do it. You get complete control over your social media, yet you get the benefit of federation with the rest of the wider “fediverse” – it really is a win-win.

I’d love to see a world where every government organization, company, and university runs their own Mastodon instance under their domain name. For companies, it allows them to centralize and control their own social media presence. For governments, it allows them their own channel for distributing information and communicating with the public. For universities, I’d expect them to give out accounts to students in much the same way you get an email address.

If, like me, you have a domain name kicking around and can afford a few bucks a month, I’d highly recommend giving it a try.

For a long time, people like me would point to 1984 in the context of state surveillance – citing concerns over increasing use of cameras, databases of personal information, and anything that helped the government keep track of where you were and what you were doing.

Recently, though, with the mechanisms of state surveillance firmly in place (and supplemented by “private” surveillance through tech companies and such), there’s been a shift towards the other side of the coin (as it were) – the enforcement of the will of the Party.

We’ve started seeing some things that honestly feel like they were ripped wholesale from the pages of 1984:

• A secret police/paramilitary force (our own “thought police” in the shape of ICE) being used against dissenters (protesters), taking people and disappearing them (making them “non-persons” by virtue of not being able to find or track them through the usual methods, moving them between prisons/facilities, and quietly shuffling them out of the country while denying ever having done so or being able to stop it once it’s done).
• Claiming that losses/defeats are actually victories (e.g. being rebuffed over Greenland, and then in the same breath turning around and claiming that you just negotiated a great deal).
• Significant use of what we can only call doublespeak – using the wrong words to refer to things you don’t like (e.g., calling protesters “insurrectionists” or “domestic terrorists, or referring to immigrants as “criminals”) to frame the narrative in the way that you want, or to distort the narrative to hide the truth, or to just outright lie and get away with it because of intentionally ambiguous or incorrect phrasing.
• Starting to see the beginnings of thoughtcrime, in treating certain concepts as so heretical and counter to the stance of the Party that the mere mention of them is subject to punishment – for example, topics like DEI or climate change.
• Something akin to the work of a Ministry of Truth in the form of re-writing historical records to align with the Party’s version of events and to always support the Party’s goals and principles as superior, and deleting from history anything that conflicts or doesn’t align with that.
• An “inner party” that has all of the power – in 1984 described as being less than 2% of the population; today we would call them “the 1%.”
• A continuous feed of state-sponsored (or state-influenced as we might say today) propaganda disguised as “news” – primarily today in the form of the big social media platforms (Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok) used to control what people hear about and influence what they believe. In a very real way, these social media platforms are the equivalent of the Telescreens of 1984 – they feed you what the state wants you to know, and they track what you do.
• A disturbing amount of very clear doublethink – people saying one thing while believing the other, or changing what they say they believe based on the circumstance or what the Party tells them to. The claim of “it was self defense” being the current equivalent to “we have always been at war with…”

I could go on and on – I could in fact probably create a list of almost every type of action the Party of 1984 took in that story and link it to some real-world action that has happened within the last year.

One thing that 1984 doesn’t do is tell us how, exactly, the world ended up in the state that is described in the book – we never get to see how the nation-states of Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia formed, or how the Party gained total control. However, given recent events I don’t think it’s hard to imagine anymore.

There is a line from 1984 – “until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious” – which is particularly applicable to today. It speaks to the commitment to the status quo, and the unwillingness to change, even when things are objectively terrible. We see this today in protest after protest, in horror and rejection of the violence of the state, and yet the voting patterns remain the same, the politicians call for change but do nothing, and the media cycle moves on to the next big thing. It is a particularly depressing thought – but only if you accept it as being true. Despite the modern-day similarities to the 3-tiered class structure of 1984 – the Inner Party (the 1%), the Outer Party (the wealthy upper-middle class), and the Proles (the 99%) – we have not quite reached that level of ignorance and irrelevance. While misinformation is rampant, the truth is still out there (for those who care to try and look for it).

There have been ample opportunities for us to stop this – plenty of times where we could have said “no,” or rolled back changes enacted in response to temporary emergencies. Things like the Patriot Act, REAL-ID, immigration reforms, and indeed the entire Department of Homeland Security itself were all created in reaction to single events, and whose purpose and useful lifetime have long since passed, yet they still persist.

Despite the late hour, there is still time to turn away from this disastrous path we are on – but that time is running out quick. If we don’t want to end up living in the world of 1984 (and to be clear, we do not), we must stop walking this path; we must stay conscious, and if necessary, we must rebel.

Now, why do I think this? Let’s go through the checklist:

• Single party controls all branches of government
• Government policy of purging people it doesn’t like (mass deportations)
• Secret police (in the form of ICE) used to terrify the populace into silence (and doubling down on the “secret” part by hiding their faces with masks)
• Attacking and de-humanizing anyone who disagrees with the party (both civilians and people in government who are not with the party – look at all the members of Congress who have been sued, threatened with legal action, or called “traitors”)
• State controlled media (FOX News, Truth Social, Twitter/X, companies firing people/censoring speech based on government influence)
• Military used against civilians (national guard deployments to cities like LA, Portland, etc.)
• Murdering people in broad daylight with no accountability

This has gone well beyond “a few bad apples in government” – this is a subversion of a formerly free and democratic government. Like most fascist states, of course it tries to keep up the pretense of being a free and democratic society, but it’s all just an act, a sham performance to fool the ignorant (or willingly ignorant).

Some people will still try to deny this, though, pointing at people who continue to resist and how some states and cities are pushing back with their own local laws. But this is all fundamentally irrelevant to my point – some pockets of resistance don’t change the fact, and a state doesn’t have to be 100% fascist top-to-bottom to be “fascist.” For all intents and purposes, the Federal government of the United States of America is fascist.

Continuing to deny that America is a Fascist State is the same as sticking your head in the sand, or putting your fingers in your ears and shouting “la la la la, everything is fine.”

This is not something that can be solved easily, either. This is no longer a case of “well, just wait until the midterms or the next election.” We have already seen what happens when people vote against the party – cries of election fraud or invalid results, and refusal to recognize or seat the newly elected representatives. This is not a surface-level problem anymore; it is systemic; it is now deeply embedded and just electing a few new people isn’t going to “fix” anything.

The first step is always admitting you have a problem, and America has a problem, and it is time to admit it, and time to start start fixing it – and it is going to be hard. It is going to require both standing up and voting out every single fascist supporter (without fail). It is going to require then deeply changing the laws, customs, and traditions of our government to prevent this sort of thing from happening again – because this was not a coup, or a violent takeover, it was done “legally.” This was done using loopholes and a carefully crafted plan to exploit weaknesses in our basic system of government. Like the horror movie trope, “the killer is in the house.”

The enemy in this case attacked us through the basic arrangement of our lives – sowing distrust and driving wedges in the gaps to drive us apart, to “divide and conquer.” And despite having the largest military in the world, America fell to this enemy as easily as a child knocking over a sand castle as the tide comes in.

It is often said that bullies only have as much power as you give them, and a fascist government is, essentially, just a “government by bullies,” so let us stand up to the bullies, refuse to do what they ask, don’t give them the power they crave, and deny them the authority they claim to have. Even though the bullies we are standing up to wear the clothes of legitimate power (uniforms and badges, official sounding titles and fancy suits), we know that they are nothing but bullies – wolves in sheeps’ clothing – and because this is a fascist government we are standing up to, not an American government, we are not only right in standing up against it, we are morally obligated to do so.

I say “we” a lot here, because like an entire classroom standing up to a few bullies, it is only by banding together that we can defeat them.

“United we stand, divided we fall.”

Hypocrites, much?

Or maybe it was never about empathy or any of that in the first place, and it was all just a thin veneer over “do what I say and don’t question me.”

Anyway, although I will never celebrate the death of another human being (however abhorrent they may be), I will say that the world is better off when they aren’t in it anymore.

Now, I was fine with this for quite a while – I had an old iPod which I kept in the car for music, and I had my phone mounted on a magnetic holder (which also did wireless charging), mounted via the CD/DVD drive slot. I could use my phone for navigation and such, though I had to look down a bit more than I liked to see the map. Still, combined with voice prompts, it was manageable, if not ideal.

Despite this, I continued to yearn for something better, and recently that yearning became stronger as Apple basically discontinued the iPod. First they removed support for syncing from iTunes (unless you got a special version), and then it basically became impossible when they ditched iTunes for the horribly-named “Apple Music” app (not to be confused with the “Apple Music” service). I actually had to get a newer iPod Touch just to keep syncing, as only the Touch was still supported well enough to sync my music… but I knew the clock was ticking before even this was unceremoniously removed. (The subject of Apple’s decisions regarding support of old iPod devices is a topic for another time.)

Now, I certainly wasn’t going to get a whole new car just for better infotainment, and replacing the entire head unit was similarly out of the question (for both cost and aesthetics), but maybe there was a way I could add something to what I already had?

This question kept rattling around in my head, and I kept an eye out for options as time went by… and eventually I heard of a company called GTA Car Kits, out of Ontario, Canada. Much to my surprise and delight, they made an Apple CarPlay (and Android Auto) upgrade kit which was specifically for my model of car – and it kept all the stock infotainment in-place, so you wouldn’t lose any functionality! (As a bonus, it even adds wireless CarPlay!)

After thinking about it for a while, I eventually gave in and bought the kit – which was not cheap, but still much less than getting an entirely new head unit. It arrived in short order, and then… I let it sit on my desk for almost a year, because I was afraid to install it myself, and I didn’t know anywhere to take it to have the work done.

The company helpfully provides a tutorial video, which showed that installing it, while not exactly hard, wasn’t exactly plug & play, either. It would also involve removing a large piece of real wood trim from the dashboard, and I was terrified of cracking it (replacements are hard to come by nowadays).

One rainy weekend though, I finally decided to give it a try.

The installation was actually very straightforward, and honestly the hardest part was getting everything back together – the unit adds some extra cables which are very difficult to fit back into the limited dashboard space behind the head unit. Effectively, it plugs itself into the factory wiring harness and then has the same connector to plug into the head unit. However, eventually I got it all back together, and voila – I have CarPlay! (And I didn’t crack the wood trim!)

The screen in my car isn’t exactly huge, but it’s big enough, and it’s a delight to finally have navigation up where I can easily see it without having to take my eyes so far away from the road.

It’s also nice to be able to use other services (e.g. streaming music) instead of relying on what’s on my device. Although I’m usually happy to just keep it on “shuffle” with my “Driving” playlist, sometimes I (or my wife) want to listen to something different, and with CarPlay this is easy.

Although I would’ve been happy with just regular CarPlay (requiring a USB connection), I’m thrilled to have the wireless version, as it allows me to keep my existing phone mount setup. I can quickly place my phone on the mount (which is magnetic) and it starts wirelessly charging my phone while also automatically connecting to CarPlay. (It actually connects to CarPlay as soon as the car wakes up – e.g., when I unlock or open the doors, as the power for the infotainment comes on when you do that, and the new unit uses the same power lines.)

One unavoidable limitation, however, is that my car does not have a touch screen, and this kit does not change that. However, you can navigate CarPlay easily enough with the little rotary dial that was used for the factory infotainment. You can twist the wheel left and right to move the “focus” on the screen, and press the wheel in to “click” or “touch” something. You can also jog the wheel up, down, left, or right (like a D-pad on a game controller), plus there’s the 2 buttons for “back” and “clear.”

So, while it’s not not quite as easy as touch, and it takes some getting used to, it’s really not that bad – and in a pinch I can always activate Siri via one of the steering wheel buttons (another nice touch) and use voice control to get things done. (Which is arguably the safer thing to do while driving.)

One thing that hasn’t worked out well, however, is the phone microphone support – for whatever reason, there is incredibly loud and piercing feedback when on phone calls, which only the person calling me can hear. I’ve fiddled with microphone settings to no avail – I suspect there is a faulty implementation of echo cancellation, or maybe the new CarPlay unit’s echo cancellation is fighting against the car’s own built-in echo cancellation or something like that. The point remains, though – the normal car phone support is basically useless; I’ve had to set my phone to use its own speakerphone when making/receiving calls. Thankfully, with where my phone is mounted, this isn’t so bad, and I hardly ever make or receive calls while driving anyway, so while sub-optimal in terms of functionality, it’s certainly not a deal-breaker. At some point I might reach out to the manufacturer to see if they have any ideas, but for now I’m OK with how it is – it works, and the other features far outweigh this small inconvenience.

Overall I’m very happy with this setup (despite the phone problems). It basically solves the most major gripe I had with this car, and having wireless charging and wireless CarPlay in an 11-year old car is pretty good in my view. Plus, I did the installation entirely myself, which makes me feel pretty good (even if it wasn’t that hard).

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.

Whatever this country is now, it is not the country it was before. It may use the same name, but it is not the same. No longer a democratic republic, but a dictatorship disguised as a democracy. No longer one nation, indivisible; rather 50-ish quasi-nation-states, divided amongst and against one another. No longer liberty and justice for all, but only for some, at the whims of the powerful few.

This July 4th is not a celebration of the birth of a nation, but a funeral for the death of a dream that was America – a dream that was real (if imperfect) for a while, but is now very much dead. Only its mangled corpse, draped in a flag, still remains, held up to continue the illusion that all is well and nothing is wrong.

This should not have happened, but it is doing more harm than good to pretend that it hasn’t.

This isn’t to say we have to accept the way things are – far from it; rather we must see this for the fight that it is: not just to flip some seats or overturn some laws, but to fundamentally undo what has been done, to re-declare our independence – except this time from an internal tyrant rather than a foreign one.

Also, today is perhaps a good day for everyone to re-read the full text of the Declaration of Independence (especially the list of grievances), and reflect on how those things that compelled the founding fathers to draft it in the first place sound all too familiar today.

Come with me, you will see what I mean
There’s a world, inside, no one else ever sees
You will go, so far in my dreams
Somewhere in my dreams
Your dreams will come true…

There is a star, waiting to guide us
Shining inside us, when we close our eyes!

Don’t let go, if you stay close to me
In my dreams, tonight
You will see what I see
Dreams to dream
As near as can be
Inside you and me
They always come… true…”

— “Dreams to Dream,” from the 1991 soundtrack to “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West.” Vocals by Cathy Cavadini, lyrics by Will Jennings, music composed by James Horner and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The midterms could come around and the Democrats could win a super-majority landslide victory and pass new laws to curtail the power of the President and to enact new safety systems for this kind of abuse and it still wouldn’t change the fact that this happened, despite the laws at the time. There is no going back to “the way things were.”

Once you step into lawlessness, once you start ignoring your own laws and rules, there is no going back – because no matter what new laws or rules you create, there will always be the knowledge that the prior laws and rules were broken before, so who’s to say they won’t be broken again? Like Yoda said, “once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to undo all this, and to enact new laws to try and prevent it in the future – but we also can’t lie to ourselves and believe that we can just make up some new rules and everything will be better and the problem is solved and it’ll never happen again. Because a core element of trust has been forever lost because of all this.

We can (and should) certainly try to restore that trust, to rebuild it, but there is no magic wand, there is no fast track for trust – the only answer is time, and most likely it will be a long time; maybe even generations.

But given the alternative, we owe it to ourselves – and to our future generations – to try, and the sooner we start, the less time we’ll have to wait.