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Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny ... Lots of folks self host on raspberry pis and similar on home connections without giving any money to DO.

Amazon is far from the only cloud provider.

Are you sincerely worried, or are you concern trolling because we don't all run co-los? (I'm working on it, but physical infra takes time.)

19 Nov 2022 at 3:05 | Open on retro.social
6 comments
Torgny Bjers

@ajroach42 No, not trolling... I am sincerely worried for the people that are self-hosting.

The problem as I see it is mainly with the stack Mastodon runs on.

Node + Rails + Postgres + Redis is a pretty high-level hydra when it comes to fighting the battle of scaling.

Which is obviously why a lot of Mastodon servers are facing issues right now and why there's so much talk about how "slow" Mastodon is.

As if Mastodon is a single entity.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:20 | Open on grim.run
Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny Instances are too big. Mastodon isn't the only fediverse software. Scaling this stuff isn't actually that difficult, but it can be expensive if done poorly.

Is there a sustainable business model? That would require there to be a business. I stated pretty clearly that we're mostly a bunch of hobbiests.

as for the scaling problems, DAUs essentially increased 3 - 5x across the whole network, and 10x on many instances. Show me any company that can absorb that much traffic without a hiccup. None of the places I've ever worked could do it.

@torgny Instances are too big. Mastodon isn't the only fediverse software. Scaling this stuff isn't actually that difficult, but it can be expensive if done poorly.

Is there a sustainable business model? That would require there to be a business. I stated pretty clearly that we're mostly a bunch of hobbiests.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:25 | Open on retro.social
Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny In all seriousness, I'm actively exploring what the expenses would look like for a 10 - 50k user instance, and what the moderation and technical support needs would be.

If we can figure out a way to make it sustainable, we'll do it.

In the meantime, there's no "business model" just people doing a thing because they believe in it.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:27 | Open on retro.social
Torgny Bjers

@ajroach42 I definitely am on the believer side!

I fired this same server up in 2016, ran it for a while and then lost interest because most people were still on Twitter.

Now I'm back, probably for the long haul. And it looks like a bunch of people have made the switch, which is very exciting.

I chose to use DO for this because I am not entirely comfortable hosting a public instance on my home network where I also work.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:40 | Open on grim.run
Andrew (bookseller era)

@torgny We're on DO at the moment, too, but that's transitional until we end up in the co-lo we're spinning up across town.

I've self hosted from a pi in a closet, I've run containers in the cloud, I've run bare metal in bulgaria. It all just keeps chugging along.

The software, for all my complaints, is pretty good. Throw brutaldon.online in to the mix, and it's downright pleasant.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:44 | Open on retro.social
Torgny Bjers

@ajroach42 That sounds awesome! I definitely host things on a variety of different hardware as well.

I finally got my fourth Pi 4 so I can spin up my home k3s cluster that I put in a cute little 1U rack thingie.

19 Nov 2022 at 3:50 | Open on grim.run
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