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Your site (or Cloudflare) is returning a redirect to https://lou.lt/ when accessing the signup page. This is most likely due to a webserver or Cloudflare misconfiguration.

It depends what you were doing, and where you were doing it.

The short answer is that it’s an connection error. The longer answer is that there’s no way to know more than that without more information.

I’m on a very small instance and, yeah, the local feed is not what I’d call the pinnacle of human thought. It’s mostly my instance’s most prolific poster responding to whatever #hastaggames have caught her attention that day.

And I’m totally OK with that. I set up my instance so I could have one that fit my needs, and then opened it up to the world once I had it established, and if it meets someone else’s needs and they’re happy there, that’s all I could ask for, really. I wasn’t expecting a riveting local feed; I set it up to federate because the plan wasn’t to have a ton of people generating stuff locally. I rarely even look at the local feed.

Some people like the “noise.” I may not, but I’m not exactly in any position to judge the content I typically engage with as somehow superior to anyone else’s; it’s just different. I am not the content police, and have no desire to be. A lot of people really seem to genuinely enjoy fluff and shitposts, and as a server admin my job is to give them a stable, welcoming place to do what they feel like doing, so I’m just going to keep doing my job.

The message you posted seems to indicate you can’t use “whatever.com” if there is another site already there, because of course you can’t… the same name can’t point two different places (well, it technically can, but don’t do that). I’m not super familiar with Mastodon, but this sounds like a warning rather than a restriction.

In any case, yes, you can make whatever.com a DNS alias for mastodon.whatever.com and handle it with configuration. Just be aware that if you ever want something else at whatever.com, it’s not easy to change the name later.

I don’t currently have a website on that root domain, but I would like to one day. Do I really have to have a long three part domain?

It sounds like you’re saying you don’t currently have a website at “whatever.com,” but would like to at some point. That being the case, I’m not sure why you would not want put Mastodon on a subdomain (for example, on “mastodon.whatever.com,” rather than on “whatever.com”). If you don’t, you’re going to run into some fairly major problems when you have to move the Mastodon instance to a new URL.