4 ms·

Regarding [1], do you foresee this changing at some point? I'm interested in self hosting, bit have heard consistently that it is painful, so I've been waiting

Regarding [1], do you foresee this changing at some point? I'm interested in self hosting, bit have heard consistently that it is painful, so I've been waiting in the hopes that it will eventually improve.

rglullis 2y ago
Hosting Mastodon is as difficult as deploying a traditional web app: if you are familiar with docker, it's just a matter of choosing where you are going to put your database, redis and where to store media. The problem is that it is expensive. Even if you host on a cheap VPS and put your media on some object storage like Storj (~$4/TB/month), you are problably looking at a minimum of $20/month for the server. If you get for yourself, maybe your friends and stay under 50 users, fine. If you get more than that then you'll need a beefier server, and if any of users follows lots of media-heavy accounts and does not set it up to delete old posts, your object storage will be full very quick.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Regarding the object store: I use DigitalOcean’s Spaces, and it runs me about $9/mo. I have about 4K users. It doesn’t have to be expensive.
- immibis 2y ago
  Pleroma was recommended to me as a less resource-intensive alternative to Mastodon and with less anti-features. It runs fine with one user on Hetzner's cheapest VPS. I delete posts mirrored from other servers older than 90 days with a cron job. It has a command to do this.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    Pleroma and GoToSocial are indeed better if you are looking for something more efficient. But I am still not happy with the idea that we should be deleting data from the server just to keep it manageable. It reminds of the before Gmail where people would get 5MB quota of Yahoo Mail and would have to go around deleting stuff from their mailboxes every other month.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Then don't, and upgrade your server by something on the order of 40GB every year.

rglullis 2y ago

Hosting Mastodon is as difficult as deploying a traditional web app: if you are familiar with docker, it's just a matter of choosing where you are going to put your database, redis and where to store media. The problem is that it is expensive. Even if you host on a cheap VPS and put your media on some object storage like Storj (~$4/TB/month), you are problably looking at a minimum of $20/month for the server. If you get for yourself, maybe your friends and stay under 50 users, fine. If you get more than that then you'll need a beefier server, and if any of users follows lots of media-heavy accounts and does not set it up to delete old posts, your object storage will be full very quick.

kstrauser 2y ago
Regarding the object store: I use DigitalOcean’s Spaces, and it runs me about $9/mo. I have about 4K users. It doesn’t have to be expensive.
immibis 2y ago
Pleroma was recommended to me as a less resource-intensive alternative to Mastodon and with less anti-features. It runs fine with one user on Hetzner's cheapest VPS. I delete posts mirrored from other servers older than 90 days with a cron job. It has a command to do this.
- rglullis 2y ago
  Pleroma and GoToSocial are indeed better if you are looking for something more efficient. But I am still not happy with the idea that we should be deleting data from the server just to keep it manageable. It reminds of the before Gmail where people would get 5MB quota of Yahoo Mail and would have to go around deleting stuff from their mailboxes every other month.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Then don't, and upgrade your server by something on the order of 40GB every year.