3 ms·

This is great to know. I've been interested in self hosting my own single user instance and it's been hard to understand the all-in cost.

genewitch 4y ago
I run two small fediverse instances, a misskey, and a pixelfed. both have fewer than 10 users, and the federated timeline only "clicks" once every few minutes. I am on several "medium" instances of ~10,000 users, and the admins that actually do the work on the infra are so tight-lipped - this bugs me. You come to me and ask "how much does it cost to do X", and i know? I'll tell you. I'm a CC0 / public domain kind of person. I don't get the secrecy. Look, how many full cores/threads and how much ram/cache, and how much storage/io, and how much ingress and egress. Sure, those you can obfuscate a bit, but can i run a 10k user instance on 2 dell rackmount machines from 2014? on a single Ryzen? A single Epyc? a half dozen raspberry pi? the chances of being able to parry "i run a php webservice" into retirement levels of money is nil, so i don't even understand the premise! To answer your question more directly: I run misskey on a 4 thread, 8GB mem, 80GB storage VM, where i interact directly with the hypervisor (proxmox). my cost is nothing, but i guess this would be maybe $10/month? I'm not including the monthly cost to host the hyper, the /24, etc; we used to own the metal, but my partner decided there are things more important than owning the metal, right now. The upside is, when i take a snapshot, that isn't managed by disks that i can physically touch. Makes them slightly more reliable to me. Other people may have weirdness about this. of the 4 "cores" the daily average is about 3% CPU usage, with monthly spikes up to 12% average usage. as far as bandwidth, the daily average is under 9kb/s and the monthly averages are under 22kb/s. a small fediverse instance with a single user is likely completely doable with a co-lo raspberry pi!
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  > a small fediverse instance with a single user is likely completely doable with a co-lo raspberry pi! You buried the lede:) That's great to know. Maybe not worth it to cloud host. Are there any issues to worry about with having downtime of my own node, other than my own ability to post and read? I haven't read enough about ActivityPub to understand the impacts of a server being down on the protocol.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    yes, i realized after i typed up my complaints about fedi admins that i did the same thing. Mastodon is php, and as such it requires php-level stuff. Misskey is nodejs (i think) and python, so it depends on if you're used to wordpress-y stuff or not. I prefer misskey because it has a "drive" - you can upload files and hotlink, or make "tweets" with them. thankfully, activitypub and Ostatus "protocols" are open source, so one could write a server implementation in whatever language du jour makes them happy, but only a few people have. I see a lot of the same issues with realtime applications like matrix (for chat) and audio/video streaming. Some php implementation (or python), and then no one else can make something that adheres to the standard. Whether that's the standard's fault or not isn't for me to say. if i get a jpeg image file, and the joint picture expert group's spec for jpeg format, i can write something to view that in a day or so. same with whatever RFC IRC was. or http. or ftp. try writing a toy matrix or fediverse implementation? meh.
    - yborg 4y ago
      >Mastodon is php Wat. It's Ruby/JS.
      - genewitch 4y ago
        my mistake, i misremembered. strange.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > the admins that actually do the work on the infra are so tight-lipped Not always. @kris-nova here is the public face of hachyderm.io and has done an excellent job communicating around architecture, incidents, etc. Everyone on that team deserves kudos.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ you are in luck... i've used this and it works out of the box
rsynnott 4y ago
Masto.host will charge you $6/month for that, though I think they’ve paused signups for now. If you want to do it yourself you can probably manage that sort of pricing using ovh or similar.

genewitch 4y ago

I run two small fediverse instances, a misskey, and a pixelfed. both have fewer than 10 users, and the federated timeline only "clicks" once every few minutes. I am on several "medium" instances of ~10,000 users, and the admins that actually do the work on the infra are so tight-lipped - this bugs me. You come to me and ask "how much does it cost to do X", and i know? I'll tell you. I'm a CC0 / public domain kind of person. I don't get the secrecy. Look, how many full cores/threads and how much ram/cache, and how much storage/io, and how much ingress and egress. Sure, those you can obfuscate a bit, but can i run a 10k user instance on 2 dell rackmount machines from 2014? on a single Ryzen? A single Epyc? a half dozen raspberry pi? the chances of being able to parry "i run a php webservice" into retirement levels of money is nil, so i don't even understand the premise! To answer your question more directly: I run misskey on a 4 thread, 8GB mem, 80GB storage VM, where i interact directly with the hypervisor (proxmox). my cost is nothing, but i guess this would be maybe $10/month? I'm not including the monthly cost to host the hyper, the /24, etc; we used to own the metal, but my partner decided there are things more important than owning the metal, right now. The upside is, when i take a snapshot, that isn't managed by disks that i can physically touch. Makes them slightly more reliable to me. Other people may have weirdness about this. of the 4 "cores" the daily average is about 3% CPU usage, with monthly spikes up to 12% average usage. as far as bandwidth, the daily average is under 9kb/s and the monthly averages are under 22kb/s. a small fediverse instance with a single user is likely completely doable with a co-lo raspberry pi!

acjohnson55 4y ago
> a small fediverse instance with a single user is likely completely doable with a co-lo raspberry pi! You buried the lede:) That's great to know. Maybe not worth it to cloud host. Are there any issues to worry about with having downtime of my own node, other than my own ability to post and read? I haven't read enough about ActivityPub to understand the impacts of a server being down on the protocol.
- genewitch 4y ago
  yes, i realized after i typed up my complaints about fedi admins that i did the same thing. Mastodon is php, and as such it requires php-level stuff. Misskey is nodejs (i think) and python, so it depends on if you're used to wordpress-y stuff or not. I prefer misskey because it has a "drive" - you can upload files and hotlink, or make "tweets" with them. thankfully, activitypub and Ostatus "protocols" are open source, so one could write a server implementation in whatever language du jour makes them happy, but only a few people have. I see a lot of the same issues with realtime applications like matrix (for chat) and audio/video streaming. Some php implementation (or python), and then no one else can make something that adheres to the standard. Whether that's the standard's fault or not isn't for me to say. if i get a jpeg image file, and the joint picture expert group's spec for jpeg format, i can write something to view that in a day or so. same with whatever RFC IRC was. or http. or ftp. try writing a toy matrix or fediverse implementation? meh.
  - yborg 4y ago
    >Mastodon is php Wat. It's Ruby/JS.
    - genewitch 4y ago
      my mistake, i misremembered. strange.
notacoward 4y ago
> the admins that actually do the work on the infra are so tight-lipped Not always. @kris-nova here is the public face of hachyderm.io and has done an excellent job communicating around architecture, incidents, etc. Everyone on that team deserves kudos.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/ you are in luck... i've used this and it works out of the box

rsynnott 4y ago

Masto.host will charge you $6/month for that, though I think they’ve paused signups for now. If you want to do it yourself you can probably manage that sort of pricing using ovh or similar.