Welcome to
Montereybay.social
A Mastodon instance for the Monterey Bay area
From Santa Cruz to Salinas, Monterey to Bonny Doon, we live in an amazing area. MontereyBay.social is the place for locals to hang out and talk about who we are and why we make this our home.
Meet the Admins
Paul has lived in Santa Cruz County for over 25 years. He has volunteered with the Santa Cruz SPCA, Rabbit Haven, CASA of Santa Cruz County, and other local nonprofits. He loves to hike, run, and cycle the paths all over the Monterey Bay area.
meet the team
“Happy will be [the ones] who, having the power and the love and the benevolent forecast [to create a park] will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call them blessed.”
- John Muir
Why are we here?
Paul launched MontereyBay.social in November 2022. The Great Twitter Migration had just started, and he was one of the people who left that site to join one of the biggest Mastodon instances. He was particularly intrigued by the idea of the Local feed, a place where you can read posts written by members of your own instance. He thought, "Wouldn't it be great if the local feed really was local and reflected the views of people who live where I do?" With over 20 years of engineering experience, it was not a huge leap for him to go from idea to implementation.
MontereyBay.social is open to everyone no matter where you live, but we want to extend a special welcome to people living in Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Cruz counties.
"Salinas Artichoke Workers" by Charlie Cowins, CC BY 2.0
Architecture and Scalability
MontereyBay.social is set up to grow. The instance is hosted on AWS, the same cloud services provider that powers Verizon, Netflix, StateFarm, and AARP, and many others. Paul works at AWS and is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner in addition to having over 20 years of professional software development experience.
We post site notifications for any planned downtime. This site (hub.montereybay.social) will be updated if we encounter any unplanned outages or service degradations.
Please use the Contact Support button above or message @paul@montereybay.social if you encounter any performance problems with the instance.