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I'll use this opportunity to mention Pleroma [1], my preferred alternative to Mastodon & others. It's much more lightweight than Mastodon. 1: https://pleroma.s

I'll use this opportunity to mention Pleroma [1], my preferred alternative to Mastodon & others. It's much more lightweight than Mastodon. 1: https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/

capableweb 4y ago
That's neat. Do you happen to know if it's possible to migrate from Mastodon to Pleroma without having to recreate the account and setting up redirects? I already host my own Mastodon instance since a few years back, and don't want to do another redirect if I can help it.
- huimang 4y ago
  To my knowledge you would have to create a new account and set up redirects, since it's a new server. Migrating is definitely a pain point in the fediverse. That's why I ended up going with a single-user instance that I selfhost.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    Yeah, I mean migrating the software of a single-user instance, not migrating between instances, sorry if that was unclear. So I currently run a single-user instance of Mastodon. Wondering if it's possible to start running a single-user instance of Pleroma instead, without having to change the username+domain?
    - jsmith45 4y ago
      My understanding is in theory yes. But in practice things might be more complicated. Like merely keeping the same name and domain is easy enough. Just shut down the old system, start the new one, create an account with the same name. Of course you would need to refollow everyone. I'm not sure what happens to your followers. Your new server will not know they are followers, so unless this triggers mastodon to try to automatically refollow, I think they are left in a half-broken state. You definitely lose all your old content. All in all, this is not really a great option. For a full migration where in theory everything works, you could try to follow the linked process to migrate to Pleroma 2.0.5, and then obviously just upgrade to latest following plemora documentation for upgrading. description of migration process: https://icyphox.sh/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/ https://icyphox.sh/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/ (This is based on the following migrator: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator). I have no idea if it works with newer mastodon minor releases.
mdaniel 4y ago
My years of scar tissue with RabbitMQ have given me a healthy suspicion of OTP ( https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma#otp-releases-recommended https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma#otp-releases-reco... ), and I would never want to be responsible for keeping it alive and healthy. For comparison, while I'm sure people also have strong opinions about rails and sidekiq, at least there is a non-trivial body of existing blog and SO posts about it
- huimang 4y ago
  That's fair. I selfhost Pleroma as a single-user instance, so I couldn't tell you about running it at scale. I went with it because it could run on a raspberry pi a few years back whereas mastodon was too resource-hungry.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  I've been working on Elixir sites for years now and have never had an issue with OTP underneath, although none of them (yet) have been high-demand. The reliability and performance characteristics have been top-notch. Is it possible that with the mass influx of Elixir users into the Erlang space since the RabbitMQ days, OTP has made leaps and bounds of improvement?
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I thought OTP was supposed to have a very strong operations/reliability story ("nine nines of reliability in telecoms" and all that)?
  - olah_1 4y ago
    For what it's worth, I remember someone shared Pleroma code in the Elixir forum and some veterans there said it was a very non-standard way of organizing an Elixir codebase. It could be possible that Pleroma is not very idiomatic Elixir / OTP.
- GordonS 4y ago
  That's odd given OTP's focus on stability and reliability. RabbitMQ has been my message bus of choice for over a decade. Configuration is a total PITA, but it's a one-time thing. Otherwise, it's been rock solid and I'll happily continue to use.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
choiceschoices 4y ago
[flagged]
- Hamcha 4y ago
  This is lunacy, why would you ever think people choose software platform over which political beliefs they maintain. I am on a predominantly LGBT+ instance and they run pleroma cause it's everyone's preference. It's there any other platform where such a thing occurs?
  - unethical_ban 4y ago
    The assertion seems to be that federated social-networking software in the wild tends to split ideologically. Your assertion would counter that a bit. In the abstract, politics shouldn't matter in the development/use of neutral software.
  - Klonoar 4y ago
    This happens far more often than you seem to think.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    This is a real thing. Pleroma's reputation on the #fediblock tag is largely "oh god it's another Pleroma with five anime girls who love to nazipost, you know what to do". Mastodon admins don't see the Pleromas like yours. All we see is the problem ones. Yesterday I saw someone running a single-user Masto who was sharing a bit of code they knocked together to auto-defederate every Pleroma their Masto saw. They said they were fine with losing the obviously vanishingly-small number of non-nazi Pleromas. I agree that this is fucked up. But this is the reputation Pleroma has among Masto admins. I don't know what Pleroma can do to change this, assuming they want to.
- olah_1 4y ago
  > Many instances are quick to block single user Pleroma instances Do you think this makes Mastodon look good? Quite the opposite.
pmarreck 4y ago
> TL;DR: Mastodon’s Sidekiq deferred execution jobs are the limiting factor for scaling federated traffic in a single-server or small cluster deployment. Sidekiq performance scales poorly under a single process model, and can be limited by database performance in a deployment of the default Dockerized configuration. Well, that in short explains why Pleroma/Elixir is a much better stack to build this in. You don't need Sidekiq (https://sipsandbits.com/2020/08/07/do-we-need-background-jobs-in-elixir/ https://sipsandbits.com/2020/08/07/do-we-need-background-job...) and you aren't stuck with a GIL (Global Interpreter Lock).
- sjustinas 4y ago
  Just to note, Pleroma also uses a job queue: Oban. https://hexdocs.pm/oban/Oban.html https://hexdocs.pm/oban/Oban.html
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    Oban is great. (I subscribe to Oban Pro.) It's also seemingly very superior to Sidekiq-like solutions for job management. But you don't need that. It's certainly a nice-to-have.
- krainboltgreene 4y ago
  > Well, that in short explains why Pleroma/Elixir is a much better stack to build this in As someone who has extensive experience in both elixir and ruby, and mastodon itself, no this is doesn't.
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    I read that a Pleroma instance can handle at least 10-50x the traffic of a Mastodon instance running on the same hardware. Based on the reports from other sites that have switched from Ruby to Elixir, this claim rings true. Are you claiming otherwise? I mean, the lack of a GIL alone (thank you, functional language with immutable data!) should give a pretty massive performance improvement
- faraaz98 4y ago
guywithahat 4y ago
I also prefer pleroma, plus they just have larger instances (like poa.st, which had more active users than mastodon.social before Elon bought twitter, although I'm unsure if that's the case now). Sites like Gab started off on Mastodon but found it was too hard to scale and moved off it.
sjustinas 4y ago
Note also that recently a fork called Akkoma[1] sprung up. If one is looking to self-host, it might be worth looking into this vs Pleroma (I don't have a horse in this race, was just doing some research on different ActivityPub servers). [1]: https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.html https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.h...
mcguire 4y ago
How much memory/cpu does Pleroma need for a single user instance?
- sjustinas 4y ago
  I spun up a test server of Pleroma recently. Following just a few people, 0 people following me AFAIK, I did join a few relays so my federated timeline is populated. It is currently showing 360MB RSS and the CPU load maxes out at ~50% of a single vCPU.
- self 4y ago
  I've run a single-user pleroma server since January 2019. I ran it on a digitalocean droplet with 2 GB RAM, and then an AWS instance (t3.small, also 2 GB) for the better part of two years; I recently switched to a t3.medium. Beam's current process size: 250MB resident, uses 5-7% CPU. I discard remote posts after 120 days, and my database (using PostgreSQL 15, no RUM indexes) takes up just over 5.4 GB (as reported by `pg_database_size`). It's grown a lot faster in the past couple of weeks. I follow 245 accounts.
riffic 4y ago
More alternatives: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps I'm partial to WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin and would highly recommend pushing for inclusion of core AP functionality into your content management system of choice (so everyone can just stand up and participate on their own domain name, like media/gov/your local school etc). Mastodon itself is fun but the real value in the fedi is going to be diversity of interoperable (or even incompatible) implementations. There (on a long enough timeline) will be a successor to Masto's fedi domination.

I'll use this opportunity to mention Pleroma [1], my preferred alternative to Mastodon & others. It's much more lightweight than Mastodon. 1: https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/

capableweb 4y ago

That's neat. Do you happen to know if it's possible to migrate from Mastodon to Pleroma without having to recreate the account and setting up redirects? I already host my own Mastodon instance since a few years back, and don't want to do another redirect if I can help it.

huimang 4y ago
To my knowledge you would have to create a new account and set up redirects, since it's a new server. Migrating is definitely a pain point in the fediverse. That's why I ended up going with a single-user instance that I selfhost.
- capableweb 4y ago
  Yeah, I mean migrating the software of a single-user instance, not migrating between instances, sorry if that was unclear. So I currently run a single-user instance of Mastodon. Wondering if it's possible to start running a single-user instance of Pleroma instead, without having to change the username+domain?
  - jsmith45 4y ago
    My understanding is in theory yes. But in practice things might be more complicated. Like merely keeping the same name and domain is easy enough. Just shut down the old system, start the new one, create an account with the same name. Of course you would need to refollow everyone. I'm not sure what happens to your followers. Your new server will not know they are followers, so unless this triggers mastodon to try to automatically refollow, I think they are left in a half-broken state. You definitely lose all your old content. All in all, this is not really a great option. For a full migration where in theory everything works, you could try to follow the linked process to migrate to Pleroma 2.0.5, and then obviously just upgrade to latest following plemora documentation for upgrading. description of migration process: https://icyphox.sh/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/ https://icyphox.sh/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/ (This is based on the following migrator: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator). I have no idea if it works with newer mastodon minor releases.

mdaniel 4y ago

My years of scar tissue with RabbitMQ have given me a healthy suspicion of OTP ( https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma#otp-releases-recommended https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma#otp-releases-reco... ), and I would never want to be responsible for keeping it alive and healthy. For comparison, while I'm sure people also have strong opinions about rails and sidekiq, at least there is a non-trivial body of existing blog and SO posts about it

huimang 4y ago
That's fair. I selfhost Pleroma as a single-user instance, so I couldn't tell you about running it at scale. I went with it because it could run on a raspberry pi a few years back whereas mastodon was too resource-hungry.
pmarreck 4y ago
I've been working on Elixir sites for years now and have never had an issue with OTP underneath, although none of them (yet) have been high-demand. The reliability and performance characteristics have been top-notch. Is it possible that with the mass influx of Elixir users into the Erlang space since the RabbitMQ days, OTP has made leaps and bounds of improvement?
throwaway894345 4y ago
I thought OTP was supposed to have a very strong operations/reliability story ("nine nines of reliability in telecoms" and all that)?
- olah_1 4y ago
  For what it's worth, I remember someone shared Pleroma code in the Elixir forum and some veterans there said it was a very non-standard way of organizing an Elixir codebase. It could be possible that Pleroma is not very idiomatic Elixir / OTP.
GordonS 4y ago
That's odd given OTP's focus on stability and reliability. RabbitMQ has been my message bus of choice for over a decade. Configuration is a total PITA, but it's a one-time thing. Otherwise, it's been rock solid and I'll happily continue to use.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

choiceschoices 4y ago

[flagged]

Hamcha 4y ago
This is lunacy, why would you ever think people choose software platform over which political beliefs they maintain. I am on a predominantly LGBT+ instance and they run pleroma cause it's everyone's preference. It's there any other platform where such a thing occurs?
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  The assertion seems to be that federated social-networking software in the wild tends to split ideologically. Your assertion would counter that a bit. In the abstract, politics shouldn't matter in the development/use of neutral software.
- Klonoar 4y ago
  This happens far more often than you seem to think.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  This is a real thing. Pleroma's reputation on the #fediblock tag is largely "oh god it's another Pleroma with five anime girls who love to nazipost, you know what to do". Mastodon admins don't see the Pleromas like yours. All we see is the problem ones. Yesterday I saw someone running a single-user Masto who was sharing a bit of code they knocked together to auto-defederate every Pleroma their Masto saw. They said they were fine with losing the obviously vanishingly-small number of non-nazi Pleromas. I agree that this is fucked up. But this is the reputation Pleroma has among Masto admins. I don't know what Pleroma can do to change this, assuming they want to.
olah_1 4y ago
> Many instances are quick to block single user Pleroma instances Do you think this makes Mastodon look good? Quite the opposite.

pmarreck 4y ago

> TL;DR: Mastodon’s Sidekiq deferred execution jobs are the limiting factor for scaling federated traffic in a single-server or small cluster deployment. Sidekiq performance scales poorly under a single process model, and can be limited by database performance in a deployment of the default Dockerized configuration. Well, that in short explains why Pleroma/Elixir is a much better stack to build this in. You don't need Sidekiq (https://sipsandbits.com/2020/08/07/do-we-need-background-jobs-in-elixir/ https://sipsandbits.com/2020/08/07/do-we-need-background-job...) and you aren't stuck with a GIL (Global Interpreter Lock).

sjustinas 4y ago
Just to note, Pleroma also uses a job queue: Oban. https://hexdocs.pm/oban/Oban.html https://hexdocs.pm/oban/Oban.html
- pmarreck 4y ago
  Oban is great. (I subscribe to Oban Pro.) It's also seemingly very superior to Sidekiq-like solutions for job management. But you don't need that. It's certainly a nice-to-have.
krainboltgreene 4y ago
> Well, that in short explains why Pleroma/Elixir is a much better stack to build this in As someone who has extensive experience in both elixir and ruby, and mastodon itself, no this is doesn't.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  I read that a Pleroma instance can handle at least 10-50x the traffic of a Mastodon instance running on the same hardware. Based on the reports from other sites that have switched from Ruby to Elixir, this claim rings true. Are you claiming otherwise? I mean, the lack of a GIL alone (thank you, functional language with immutable data!) should give a pretty massive performance improvement
faraaz98 4y ago

guywithahat 4y ago

I also prefer pleroma, plus they just have larger instances (like poa.st, which had more active users than mastodon.social before Elon bought twitter, although I'm unsure if that's the case now). Sites like Gab started off on Mastodon but found it was too hard to scale and moved off it.

sjustinas 4y ago

Note also that recently a fork called Akkoma[1] sprung up. If one is looking to self-host, it might be worth looking into this vs Pleroma (I don't have a horse in this race, was just doing some research on different ActivityPub servers). [1]: https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.html https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.h...

mcguire 4y ago

How much memory/cpu does Pleroma need for a single user instance?

sjustinas 4y ago
I spun up a test server of Pleroma recently. Following just a few people, 0 people following me AFAIK, I did join a few relays so my federated timeline is populated. It is currently showing 360MB RSS and the CPU load maxes out at ~50% of a single vCPU.
self 4y ago
I've run a single-user pleroma server since January 2019. I ran it on a digitalocean droplet with 2 GB RAM, and then an AWS instance (t3.small, also 2 GB) for the better part of two years; I recently switched to a t3.medium. Beam's current process size: 250MB resident, uses 5-7% CPU. I discard remote posts after 120 days, and my database (using PostgreSQL 15, no RUM indexes) takes up just over 5.4 GB (as reported by `pg_database_size`). It's grown a lot faster in the past couple of weeks. I follow 245 accounts.

riffic 4y ago

More alternatives: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps I'm partial to WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin and would highly recommend pushing for inclusion of core AP functionality into your content management system of choice (so everyone can just stand up and participate on their own domain name, like media/gov/your local school etc). Mastodon itself is fun but the real value in the fedi is going to be diversity of interoperable (or even incompatible) implementations. There (on a long enough timeline) will be a successor to Masto's fedi domination.