With all the praise to Mastodon, I find it's still difficult and a expensive to host an instance. I host two instances, an "original" mastodon for friends, and

With all the praise to Mastodon, I find it's still difficult and a expensive to host an instance. I host two instances, an "original" mastodon for friends, and a gotosocial instance for myself. The problem with original is once you want to get everything "right", starting from searches, you'll need to maintain an elastic search instance, with CJK language support you'll have to modify the the code a bit. I hate elastic search with moderate passion, and it's quite expensive to keep one up. Then I had spun up an minio for s3 compatible storage, the complexity of running a mastodon is very close to a full time job at this point. There's also something went beyond technical pov, e.g I'm worried about all of the image from the federated instances that were cached locally will raise some legal and compliance concerns. I will need to plan for moderation staffing for that if the instance grows, that's not very ideal. For the personal parts, I don't have much complains to the gotosocial instance, with only exption bring that it doesn't have a good ui.