I usually have my virtual meetings over Google Meet. Unfortunately, I keep forgetting to click the “Add Google Meet” button in Google Calendar when scheduling meetings. Then it’s often a scramble to agree on a meet link before the meeting starts. The public instance of Google Calendar has a setting to automatically add Google Meet to events you create (under Settings > General > Event Settings): Unfortunately, if you’re on a Google Workspace account, your administrator can remove this setting.

Here are a few thoughts about self-hosting my own Mastodon instance, why I do it, how I do it, and how it is going. Spoiler: It’s not hard, and I like it so far. (After saying that, I’ll probably soon run into hard issues 😀) Why did I want to host my own instance? There isn’t actually a strong reason. Part of it was just the nerd in me wanting to try it out, but then it also seemed to be an answer to my choose-the-right-instance conundrum.