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I really wish more libre-social apps would support serverless deployment options. If I were to deploy a personal Mastodon instance on Heroku, it would be, what,

I really wish more libre-social apps would support serverless deployment options. If I were to deploy a personal Mastodon instance on Heroku, it would be, what, close to $30/month? Shared hosting from a provider like masto.host is $6/month and quickly rises with use? What if there was a CloudFormation stack that quickly brought up Mastodon on API Gateway + Lambda + SQS + S3 + DynamoDB? Costs nothing if you don't post or follow anybody, with slowly rising costs as you use Mastodon more, and basically no ops concerns? Wouldn't that eliminate most of the technical barriers (cost, ops hassle, albeit still some setup hassle) for promoting federated social?

nathants 4y ago
independent scale to zero services per end user is definitely the play. people can sell their data on marketplaces if they want to cover the few dollars a month of usage fees.
Vecr 4y ago
Yeah if you don't federate with anyone. Otherwise people will send you stuff to rack up your bill. I say just run it from your house, and use wireguard and haproxy with a VPS to get the traffic to and from the wider Internet if you don't have IPs and/or don't want your home network getting DOSed.
- solatic 4y ago
  > People will send you stuff to rack up your bill Sure, but on a personal level, that's still very, very cheap, almost without concern for how much you follow. CloudFront and API Gateway are pennies per million requests. SQS usage would probably fit in the free tier. DynamoDB, if implemented with a single-table design, would probably cost no more than a couple of bucks, and storage would probably fit in the free tier. You can use IAM policy on pre-signed URLs to restrict the maximum object size of an object that someone is sending you, as well as implement effective rate limiting and automatic expiration with lifecycle policies that keep costs under control. Of course, costs could expand if the user wants to keep an infinite history, but that's their choice, by design.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  One of the biggest problems that decentralization faces is that governments have been dragging their feet on mandating IPv6 rollout and IPv4 shutdown : 256 persistent (prefix) IPs is supposed to be the bare minimum for residential customers ! https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690#4-2-2---48-for-business-customers-and--56-for-residential-customers https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690#4-2-2---48-f...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
freewizard 4y ago
If cost is concern, consider Elixr-based Pleroma(or its forks), way less hardware requirement with most feature parity w Mastodon. Ops is good q, based on my observation, most of these implementations has a Dockerfile at best, CloudFormation/K8s is very rarely considered. And probably bc where this community was originated from, Amazon is pretty much suggested against.
- nileshtrivedi 4y ago
  Pleroma still requires PostgreSQL which is an overkill for individuals/families. Instead try GoToSocial which is just a golang binary + sqlite db file: https://gotosocial.org/ https://gotosocial.org/
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ it is able to run properly on a pi so the performance is not a problem
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    I'm pinning my hopes on GSL - already had to migrate my Pleroma from one server to another because whilst it is less hungry than Mastodon, it is still -quite- hungry. (The number of "X doesn't work with GSL" issues is mildly worrying, and migrating from Pleroma to GSL is going to make me insane. But hope, nonetheless.)
  - stavros 4y ago
    That page is basically empty. Why is there nothing on it, not even a link to the project?
    - manfre 4y ago
      That's a really unhelpful landing page. Finding their git repo wasn't too difficult. https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
ceres 4y ago
But isn’t that antithetical to decentralization? Would you consider mastodon decentralized if you had to rely on AWS?
- paulgb 4y ago
  If you had to use Amazon, sure. But the option would be nice. That said, I’ve tried supporting both DynamoDB and an RDBMS with the same software and it was a pain, and this was for something with a less complicated schema then Mastadon. I think what’s missing here is really a scale-to-zero, serverless RDBMS (maybe Supabase or Neon fit the bill?)
- yewenjie 4y ago
  I think having multiple deployment stack options will only help more adoption, and is a practical choice that will drive more decentralisation.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Decentralisation isn’t about never running things on a centralised stack. It’s about not having to.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
You can set it up on low end servers like from lowendbox.com... You can get a year worth of 2/3/4 GB ram servers for quite cheaper than heroku or linode. I have a bunch of servers running and they are not bad. Like the other commenter said, pleroma is a good lighter alternative and it can be run on raspberry pi if you want
encryptluks2 4y ago
I think it is the hosting providers you are looking at. There are providers at a fraction of what you mention. AWS seems great but before you know it you'll be paying substantial transfer costs.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Mastodon is quite light weight, I don't see how you could possibly need a $30 server for that. $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage. If you need more storage, find a cheap S3 host and use that with Mastodon for file storage. I don't quite see the point of going Amazon specific with an open API like this but I'm sure you can implement ActivityPub using whatever Amazon offers. You'll probably start racking up a bill quite quickly though. I don't see how using AWS is possibly a lower technical barrier when there's a docker-compose file ready to use already.
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  > $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage. Pretty reasonable, from who though? Also do they support IaC so that you can tear down and rebuild automatically?
  - manfre 4y ago
    Most of the cheap VPS providers I've seen don't provide API access to create/destroy the instance. After it's created, you can bootstrap it for docker with ssh+bash or Ansible giving more options for a consistent deploy flow.
- okasaki 4y ago
  > $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage. Wow, where do you get that?
  - pantalaimon 4y ago
    https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Contabo.com. I use two of their servers to self-host some stuff and so far they've been quite stable. There are other cheap providers but they're often of questionable reliability. Luckily you can pay monthly rather than yearly like many other budget VPS providers, which convinced me to try them out back in the day.

nathants 4y ago

independent scale to zero services per end user is definitely the play. people can sell their data on marketplaces if they want to cover the few dollars a month of usage fees.

Vecr 4y ago

Yeah if you don't federate with anyone. Otherwise people will send you stuff to rack up your bill. I say just run it from your house, and use wireguard and haproxy with a VPS to get the traffic to and from the wider Internet if you don't have IPs and/or don't want your home network getting DOSed.

solatic 4y ago
> People will send you stuff to rack up your bill Sure, but on a personal level, that's still very, very cheap, almost without concern for how much you follow. CloudFront and API Gateway are pennies per million requests. SQS usage would probably fit in the free tier. DynamoDB, if implemented with a single-table design, would probably cost no more than a couple of bucks, and storage would probably fit in the free tier. You can use IAM policy on pre-signed URLs to restrict the maximum object size of an object that someone is sending you, as well as implement effective rate limiting and automatic expiration with lifecycle policies that keep costs under control. Of course, costs could expand if the user wants to keep an infinite history, but that's their choice, by design.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
One of the biggest problems that decentralization faces is that governments have been dragging their feet on mandating IPv6 rollout and IPv4 shutdown : 256 persistent (prefix) IPs is supposed to be the bare minimum for residential customers ! https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690#4-2-2---48-for-business-customers-and--56-for-residential-customers https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690#4-2-2---48-f...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

freewizard 4y ago

If cost is concern, consider Elixr-based Pleroma(or its forks), way less hardware requirement with most feature parity w Mastodon. Ops is good q, based on my observation, most of these implementations has a Dockerfile at best, CloudFormation/K8s is very rarely considered. And probably bc where this community was originated from, Amazon is pretty much suggested against.

nileshtrivedi 4y ago
Pleroma still requires PostgreSQL which is an overkill for individuals/families. Instead try GoToSocial which is just a golang binary + sqlite db file: https://gotosocial.org/ https://gotosocial.org/
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ it is able to run properly on a pi so the performance is not a problem
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  I'm pinning my hopes on GSL - already had to migrate my Pleroma from one server to another because whilst it is less hungry than Mastodon, it is still -quite- hungry. (The number of "X doesn't work with GSL" issues is mildly worrying, and migrating from Pleroma to GSL is going to make me insane. But hope, nonetheless.)
- stavros 4y ago
  That page is basically empty. Why is there nothing on it, not even a link to the project?
  - manfre 4y ago
    That's a really unhelpful landing page. Finding their git repo wasn't too difficult. https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

ceres 4y ago

But isn’t that antithetical to decentralization? Would you consider mastodon decentralized if you had to rely on AWS?

paulgb 4y ago
If you had to use Amazon, sure. But the option would be nice. That said, I’ve tried supporting both DynamoDB and an RDBMS with the same software and it was a pain, and this was for something with a less complicated schema then Mastadon. I think what’s missing here is really a scale-to-zero, serverless RDBMS (maybe Supabase or Neon fit the bill?)
yewenjie 4y ago
I think having multiple deployment stack options will only help more adoption, and is a practical choice that will drive more decentralisation.
scrollaway 4y ago
Decentralisation isn’t about never running things on a centralised stack. It’s about not having to.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

You can set it up on low end servers like from lowendbox.com... You can get a year worth of 2/3/4 GB ram servers for quite cheaper than heroku or linode. I have a bunch of servers running and they are not bad. Like the other commenter said, pleroma is a good lighter alternative and it can be run on raspberry pi if you want

encryptluks2 4y ago

I think it is the hosting providers you are looking at. There are providers at a fraction of what you mention. AWS seems great but before you know it you'll be paying substantial transfer costs.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Mastodon is quite light weight, I don't see how you could possibly need a $30 server for that. $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage. If you need more storage, find a cheap S3 host and use that with Mastodon for file storage. I don't quite see the point of going Amazon specific with an open API like this but I'm sure you can implement ActivityPub using whatever Amazon offers. You'll probably start racking up a bill quite quickly though. I don't see how using AWS is possibly a lower technical barrier when there's a docker-compose file ready to use already.

flanked-evergl 4y ago
> $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage. Pretty reasonable, from who though? Also do they support IaC so that you can tear down and rebuild automatically?
- manfre 4y ago
  Most of the cheap VPS providers I've seen don't provide API access to create/destroy the instance. After it's created, you can bootstrap it for docker with ssh+bash or Ansible giving more options for a consistent deploy flow.
okasaki 4y ago
> $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage. Wow, where do you get that?
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  https://lowendbox.com/ https://lowendbox.com/
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Contabo.com. I use two of their servers to self-host some stuff and so far they've been quite stable. There are other cheap providers but they're often of questionable reliability. Luckily you can pay monthly rather than yearly like many other budget VPS providers, which convinced me to try them out back in the day.