Pleroma also runs on basically everything, which is another big mark in favor of it. Mastodon is a ruby on rails dinosaur, which to its credit scales as well a

Pleroma also runs on basically everything, which is another big mark in favor of it. Mastodon is a ruby on rails dinosaur, which to its credit scales as well as Ruby usually does. The disadvantage is that if you're trying to run something for yourself, you're looking at a cost that is hard to justify. Last I tried using it, without downtuning sidekiq workers, you get constant CPU pressure and ~2GB idle ram usage and that's on a low-cost VPS from Hetzner (somewhere below the 10$ mark). It also caches media like there's no tomorrow, which means that you basically need a cronjob to clear out old attachments and for 4 years straight you couldn't clean out old avatars and headers either. Pleroma by contrast uses barely any CPU when idle and it's ram usage has only rarely exceeded the 300mb mark (and only when I foolishly plugged my instance into a relay). Media caching is off by default, so it doesn't clog up your disk unless you want it to.