Welcome!

This is the official blog of Gamepad.Club – a place where we’ll share all of the server news, updates, and future plans. It’ll also be a place for guides on getting the most from Mastodon, whether you’re a complete newcomer or a seasoned traveller of the Fediverse. And finally, it’s where you’ll be able to get a peek under the hood at how the technology works and what any donations are spent on.

Although there were earlier posts made in the days leading up to it, the first preserved post on Gamepad.Club was made at nearly 3pm GMT on 26th January, with a soft launch starting 3 days later. Which, depending on how you look at it, probably makes this blog five-and-a-half months overdue. With Patreon donations reaching critical mass and the first major upgrades planned, it was time to go truly long-form. Besides, the ten-year Blaugust anniversary was too good an opportunity to pass up!

Talking about future plans, what do those look like? In a nutshell, there’s two current focal points: solidifying the service, and improving the experience for new community joiners.

Gamepad.Club currently runs on a Shared CPU virtual server. It means that we’re competing against other servers in the same data centre, which is normally fine – we’re a good neighbour! But occasionally we need to use all the CPU and don’t get it, or the other servers grab it all and leave us with nothing. If you’ve experienced random slow-downs, you know what that feels like.

Our first step is moving to a dedicated 4 core virtual CPU, which means no more sharing! It’s also more expensive… but the generosity of our Patreon supporters makes it affordable. From there, a number of enhancements are possible as our community grows, but I’ll save that for a future blogpost. Once a date has been chosen for the upgrade, we’ll be sure to share it (and the likely downtime) both here and on the official Mastodon account.

Switching focus to new joiners, we get a trickle of signups via Join Mastodon and instances.social. Every request is approved manually to prevent spambot surges, and then welcomed by one of the moderation team. But we still get a fair few people who bounce out without ever posting, or who join and post a couple of times.

This blog is part of the response to tackling this problem. Over time as the site develops, a series of guides will be written here with the intention of helping newcomers get started. These guides can then be shared during the welcome, added to pinned posts, and so on. They’re also applicable to the wider Mastodon community, so it gives back a little too!

In ten days’ time, Gamepad.Club will hit the six month mark. Looking back, it’s amazing to see how far the cozy and supportive community has grown beyond all expectation. The next half-year promises to be even more phenomenal.

And remember: whether it’s a d-pad or dice, keep gaming.

Gazz