How much I’ve spent so far running my own Mastodon server on AWS

https://www.micahwalter.com/how-much-ive-spent-so-far-running-my-own-mastodon-server-on-aws/

by Stratoscope • 4 years ago

188 137 4 years ago

Like OP, I keep being surprised by how easy it is to drive up bills with Cloudwatch. It’s small numbers here, but I’ve seen this happen at 4-5 digits as well.

acjohnson552• 4 years ago

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.

genewitch3• 4 years 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!

acjohnson552• 4 years 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.

notacoward2• 4 years 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.

2Gkashmiri2• 4 years ago

https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/

you are in luck... i've used this and it works out of the box

rsynnott3• 4 years 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.

invalidname4• 4 years ago

I would bet the cost would be lower if you use Digital Ocean/Linode and CloudFlare. Both have 5USD instances with no egress costs at these scales. No need to commit for three years or anything.

If you already own a domain you can use a subdomain and cut even that cost although it might make up for a long URL.

I think the main cost here is time. Probably far more expensive than all of those costs. Even on AWS.

x86hacker10103• 4 years ago

Came to say this. I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know. The downside is that AWS has all this expense for fancy stuff that can be done usually with a cheap instance, docker and nginx.

- Cloudflare for caching, DNS, domains. - Hetzner, Linode or DO for a cheap instance

See what does/doesn't work. Storagebox on Hetzner is cheaper storage hosting and you can have redundant backups for cheap on backblaze as well or offshore cheap VPS doing encrypted backups with rclone/rsync.

f6v• 4 years ago

I think I see a lot of people default to AWS, maybe because their employer uses them and it's what they know

I don’t get why people assume others are just mindless fruit flies in these threads. Maybe OP just doesn’t want to fiddle with technology and pays Amazon to simply get it done. That’s what I’d do, there’s no need to turn every project into excercise in orchestrating open-source software.

cultofmetatron2• 4 years ago

aws is the ibm of cloud. As a CTO, I'm beholden both to my cofounders and our investors. I'd rather spend my energy defending or pushing novel engineering practices or directions for our tech stack rather than going to DO or hetzner. also AWS is huge and their reliability is damn good. Plus its relatively easy to get in contact with a real support engineer when shit its the fan. When you have a lot of customers depending on your software to "just work." That premium is worthwhile.

vxNsr• 4 years ago

This guy works at AWS. I’m guessing that’s the main reason he’s using it.

comprev• 4 years ago

So it's a sneaky marketing blog then.

AWS - "Free to get data in, expensive to get out"

scrollaway2• 4 years ago

Nope it wouldn’t be. I run my single user instance on DO. I haven’t looked at the exact costs but they are higher.

First of all, a 5USD/mo instance cannot run mastodon. Mastodon needs a lot of resources from the get go, even with one user.

Second, you’ll want to enable backups, which is 20 percent of instance cost as extra.

Third, you will want more disk space than is available on a base instance. Mastodon is huge and disk space is taken up pretty quickly. With AWS you can set up autoscaling drives, DO doesn’t. So, more costs…

Finally, if you want to use DO Spaces, that is a flat 5USD/mo. AWS S3 is far cheaper for what would be used in this instance, on the order of free tier or couple of cents. The OP did the set up incorrectly which is why their costs are far higher. I actually did set up AWS S3 on my DO instance and the costs are extremely low.

So why am I using DO? I have credits on it, that’s all. I’ll move to AWS and probably set up Takahe at some point: https://docs.jointakahe.org/

invalidname4• 4 years ago

Interesting. I'm mostly on Linode and don't run a Mastodon instance. I did the back of the envelope calculations based on numbers from google but I guess you would know better.

In Linode you can get additional block storage for a relatively low cost: https://www.linode.com/pricing/#block-storage So a 5 or 10USD instance should be enough.

I will say that S3 is very expensive not because of the upfront cost. It's because of traffic. Also cloudflare is more affordable than AWS.

INTPenis3• 4 years ago

You could improve in some places.

I also use DO and first of all Mastodon itself, the web services, streaming API, can run on minimal nodes. I have almost 1000 MAU's now and only need about 600M RAM for each web service container instance.

And backups, for that I use postgres-operator (yes it's kubernetes), which does S3 backups and those cost almost nothing. (I know cost can go up if I need to restore because of egress traffic)

Media is also in S3, with a Cloudfront proxy. As soon as I enabled the CF proxy my S3 costs went down to 0.1 dollars basically.

And finally, thank the gods for kubernetes because it allows me to dynamically scale up sidekiq when the queues are backed up.

So my base cost for 1000 MAU's on DO is about 150USD/month. But it goes up if Sidekiq scales up temporarily, so it's a fluent final cost based on how many times Sidekiq had to scale up in a month.

Most importantly for me is that nothing in this setup is vendor locked. S3 compatible services are plenty, cloudfront web proxy services, plenty of those out there, AWS SES for outgoing e-mails can also be replaced. And of course kubernetes with proper IaC can be deployed into any managed k8s solution.

berns2• 4 years ago

Both have 5USD instances

DigitalOcean no longer has a USD 5 instance, it's USD 6 now.

invalidname4• 4 years ago

Thanks for the update. I'm shocked they raised that.

AlchemistCamp2• 4 years ago

They increased what was provided in the old $5 a couple of times, before raising the price to $6, though.

Also, there’s a new $4 entry-tier droplet that has the same CPU, the same amount of ram and the same amount of storage as my $5 droplet used to: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets

The included bandwidth is only half as much (500GiB), but I suspect most people who would have gotten $5 droplets in the past will now be getting $4 ones.

wkat42423• 4 years ago

Try Scaleway, stardust. You can only have 2 but they are 2 euro a month. And free bandwidth. I really like them (Note: I have mentioned them several times in this thread but I have no affiliation or commercial interest - just a happy customer).

rsynnott3• 4 years ago

Yeah, if you want to do this as cheaply as possible, you certainly don’t want to use AWS. In particular using s3 seems difficult to justify.

That said I assume the author is not trying for cheapest-possible.

panarky• 4 years ago

With a single-user instance and a relay, traffic is 99% inbound, and the biggest cost will be storage.

But once there are a few hundred users, Sidekiq jobs will use a lot of compute and egress data will add up. Might be better in this case to use a provider with generous free bandwidth.

birdymcbird• 4 years ago

AWS costs can destroy you, unless you’re using managed AWS services to replace bloated IT org full of support personnel not doing much productive work in first place.

If you really need scale, AWS can be cheaper than rolling your own infra and abstractions, granted you make it a mission to keep laser focus on AWS costs.

Primary ideal use case for AWS is internal Amazon usage. Charge internally but write off as expenses, for infra you had sitting idle anyway. Pretty sure AWS and rest of Amazon are separate legal entities to take advantage of tax laws.

ReflectedImage• 4 years ago

I'm not so sure about the cheaper at scale.

Renting is usually more expensive than owning. The larger you get, the more expensive renting is compared to owning.

lokedhs• 4 years ago

The best use cause is a system where you have vast spikes in compute requirements on rare occasions. You can then use AWS to get those resources for limited period of time. For this user case, it actually works pretty well.

For anything else, there are always going to be cheaper and better solutions.

CuriousCosmic• 4 years ago

AWS fits the niche of "holy fuck my site is blowing up and I don't want it to crumble while I onboard new users or some event is going on".

You probably shouldn't use it for day to day ops but it's a really good spillway for extremely temporary & particularly for unexpected spikes of traffic.

Of course you could argue that AWS is particularly bad but I think this applies to most non-bare-metal instance cloud services.

Marsymars• 4 years ago

AWS costs can destroy you, unless you’re using managed AWS services to replace bloated IT org full of support personnel not doing much productive work in first place.

OTOH, if you have an understaffed infra team that gets by by accumulating technical debt on infrastructure, AWS takes away that option at several levels of abstraction.

robga3• 4 years ago

This is a well written post that explains how to tune an AWS single user instance deployment, and the costs that may be expected. It makes me feel that I’m getting rather good value at masto.host for my personal instance (I was on a waitlist for a few weeks).

What mastodon is missing is a good catalogue of reference deployments for 1, 10, 100, 1000, users on the major platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, DO, OVH, Hetzner). Of course, “users” is a rather poor proxy for “activity” but it’s a start.

There are “scaling” articles that say “the first thing you’ll need to address is…” and breathless blogs of “what we did when we doubled registered users overnight”. But not so much if you’re starting an instance for a community that you know will be a certain size quickly. How many cores should I expect sidekiq to need to service each thousand typical users?

Sure, it’s a piece of cake for sysadmins or an AWS solutions architect, but it makes me wonder how many fragile instances there are out there that have grown fast but could also fail fast.

windexh8er• 4 years ago

Sure, it’s a piece of cake for sysadmins or an AWS solutions architect, but it makes me wonder how many fragile instances there are out there that have grown fast but could also fail fast.

The way I read the post showcased how easy it was for the AWS SA to make insane billing mistakes with unneeded things like CloudWatch. They also hide the cost of EC2 because there's no charge for that instance type until 2023. This isn't a positive advertisement for AWS in my mind. This is in line with experience I've had with former AWS consumers I've converted over to DigitalOcean in 2022. I saved those conversions, on average, 70% of their prior AWS bill - with no loss of functionality. AWS has spun out of control with the nickel and dime aspect to billing. I can't say I'd recommend it to small or very large clients unless you have money to burn. At the end of the day "traditional" architectures on AWS are not cost effective without excessive oversight of choices.

solatic• 4 years ago

He talks about using an RI to reduce the monthly bill to under $5/month for compute. But in general, I think you're right. The value AWS offers for traditional architectures is for orgs running the numbers on lift-and-shift, compared to running on-prem infrastructure; greenfield projects should take advantage of cloud-native patterns.

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

It cracks me up that both AWS and especially Azure overcharge for logging to the point that it’s easy for logs to cost more than the underlying system they’re monitoring!

If you sit down and work out their cost of data processing, it costs them cents to provide a service for which they charge tens to hundreds of dollars.

I figure the reasoning is that large enterprise requires logging for compliance, and it’s a hidden charge that’s easy to overlook in a bill.

somehnacct3757• 4 years ago

I also got a chuckle because the author is a professional AWS architect and still couldn't avoid accidental charges. Well, architect isn't salesman! Thankfully the mistake was corrected by paying the bill in full.

yegle• 4 years ago

AFAIKT the AWS SA takes commission, and should indeed be considered a sales role.

berkle4455• 4 years ago

There really needs to be a better layer than vanilla S3. PUT costs are absurdly high and it’s a terrible filesystem.

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

EFS, while much more expensive for storage, might win out if request costs are the problem.

15155• 4 years ago

Cloudflare R2 is at least cheaper.

DoctorOW2• 4 years ago

R2 is incomplete S3 API at the moment. It is incompatible with Mastodon.

hkt• 4 years ago

For the avid self hoster, SeaweedFS:

https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs

pyuser583• 4 years ago

The instance I’m on is spending over $1000/month.

ihateolives• 4 years ago

How many active users do you have?

unshavedyak2• 4 years ago

Mine (Mastodon.art) published their financials on Patreon. Iirc a couple months ago we were in the 15k user range, for ~$700/m.

rsynnott3• 4 years ago

A lot of instances have had to scale up rapidly lately, which doesn’t help. Steady state cost will likely be lower.

hbogert3• 4 years ago

Get fiber and host this from your own home. When i see these absurd costs I'm happy with the k8s I built, with ceph for storage.

ryanisnan3• 4 years ago

Learn from the mistakes of others, do not do this. Remember Yevgeniy Nikulin?

KomoD3• 4 years ago

What relevance does Yevgeniy Nikulin have with this, whatsoever?

seanhunter• 4 years ago

Costs of $1.70 per day which is mostly $30 for the domain name counts as “absurd”?

KomoD3• 4 years ago

Yes, considering his instance has a single user, himself.

If more people sign up to his instance, or he just uses it, the costs will keep going up due to the caching Mastodon does for assets (and especially due to the fact he also doesn't have purging enabled)

hbogert3• 4 years ago

Imagine every little project costs you 30 dollars. ( He's getting compute for free for now, I included that)

That will add up. The cloudwatch costs are just ridiculous.

Even with the high energy costs in Europe I'll just be migrating to a more efficient machines and I will lower my power budget from 100 watt to 50. For now, with the current 100 watt I can run 4 nodes each with a hard drive and ssd, 16 gb of mem. These are hp 6300s, old but low power and if needed they can stil pack a punch with the i5 CPUs.

aprdm3• 4 years ago

Do you have an article on how to set it up like that ?

layoric2• 4 years ago

I do this, but just with straight docker compose. I’ve been using AWS for personal and work for about 8 years and realised over time it is a poor investment if you are always hosting your own stuff and experimenting with tech.

So this year I bought at old Dell T7910 workstation and fitted it out with a 14 core E5-2680 V4 (second one coming), 1TB nvme, 64gb RAM and has cost me around $400 USD. Runs at around 95 watt and I already have a good fibre connection any way.

For a similar spec machine I would be paying this every month and now I can just keep throwing things I’m interested in at it and so far has been overkill for a relatively fixed price. More messing around with hardware but something I mostly enjoy.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

I do this in a VM. My mastodon server (for me personally) and BirdsiteLIVE bridge run on a VM on my old laptop configured as a Proxmox server. The entire thing has less than 2GB of RAM but it still runs just fine.

The incredibly inefficient Rails framework Mastodon is written in annoys me with its wasted performance but honestly the load for one or just a few users isn't even enough for me to start looking for an alternative. I'm sure I'd need to switch to a more optimized ActivityPub server if I'd get 10k users on my server, but for a small private instance you really don't need anything all that fancy.

secondcoming• 4 years ago

How much is your internet per month, and what are your electricity costs per KWh?

Macha• 4 years ago

My internet is €70/mo, and if I did not self host anything it would be... €65/mo. The speed I pay for because video games are massive these days so the only saving would be dropping a static IP.

Electricity per kwh is quite expensive these days, at €0.43/kwh because of war. My hardware is quite inefficient too, being cast off gaming hardware that is way overkill for the use case. Still, it averages 200W under load so that's (0.43 * 24/5) or €2/day.

So €65/mo, with some of the world's most expensive electricity. With 2021 energy rates the electricity cost would have been one third of 2022, at €25/mo. Use more reasonable hardware like a pi 8gb or a nuc or something rather than a used gaming PC and you could get even lower, though obviously you'd want to depreciate your hardware cost.

Meanwhile comparable compute from AWS is $1/hr

abdullahkhalids• 4 years ago

I host a Canvas LMS on Hetzner to run online courses. We sometimes have hundreds of students simultaneously giving quizzes and exams on the LMS.

I think we pay 16.81 Euros/month.

I am fairly sure a mastodon server should run on a server with half the stats and price.

georgyo• 4 years ago

This is well written, but is only 30 days worth of data.

$20/month, not including compute, is their starting point on AWS. As they get more followers and follow more people that will continue to grow.

My biggest suggestion is to disable the relay. I took experimented with using a public relay, but the stream of content it adds is very low value. Better to create a second account on the instance that is more aggressive about following people your only tangentially interested in. This will make your federated feed interesting, but keep your main feed more focused.

To the people suggesting DO/Linode. I'm a big supporter of Linode, however article has no egress or compute costs. Likely because it's a single user instance running on the free tier. Their costs are almost all storage related.

layoric2• 4 years ago

A good compromise I’ve found is using something like “FakeRelay”[0] with “GetMoarFediverse”[1] to pull in specific tags from specific larger servers. This acts as a way to get more interesting content in your search and other mastodon tabs while benefiting from the moderation efforts of larger servers. Always good to ask the admins of those servers before you do incase they are already at capacity and don’t want the extra load, and contribute to their patreon if they have one.

[0] https://github.com/g3rv4/FakeRelay [1] https://github.com/g3rv4/GetMoarFediverse

bayesian_horse• 4 years ago

Is it true that most posts on self-hosted Mastodon are actually about self-hosting Mastodon?

Legogris• 4 years ago

No, not by a stretch.

pimeys7• 4 years ago

I run an Akkoma server for a few friends in Hetzner:

- Cloudflare DNS

- 2x CPU 2GB RAM application server with snapshots

- 2x CPU 2GB RAM postgres server with automated backups

- 2x CPU 8GB RAM elastic search server to provide a full-text search for the known Fediverse

The search is not mandatory, but super nice to have. It is about 20€ a month, not counting the domain costs due to having it already for other purposes.

Akkoma is written in elixir and is much better in handling async messaging. No need for Sidekiq or Redis. My CPU usage hovers around 6-12% and memory around 55%. Postgres uses about the same.

I've never tried Mastodon, but having been a Ruby developer in my past life, I needed to find something else to install when I joined the Fediverse. Couldn't be happier with my setup. It just works, I never really need to do any maintenance.

All the normal clients work with it.

https://akkoma.social/

aprdm3• 4 years ago

Can Akkoma talk with Mastodon? Otherwise I think I miss the point of your post

bongobingo1• 4 years ago

Communicate with all your friends on the fediverse, no matter if they're on mastodon, pleroma, or any other fediverse software.

Probably? (Maybe it explodes if you try.)

resonious• 4 years ago

It says it implements ActivityPub on the site so yes it should talk to Mastodon.

pimeys7• 4 years ago

Talks with Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerHub, Pixelfed, Misskey, Friendica and every other software using the ActivityPub protocol.

danw1979• 4 years ago

What type and size of storage are you using for this ?

pimeys7• 4 years ago

Ah, I forgot to add that: I use Wasabi's S3 storage for files. This is probably the most amount of money I pay and a bit wasteful. We have about one or two images per month in uploads, but Wasabi is 5 euros a month for the first terabyte of storage. Egress is free though.

INTPenis3• 4 years ago

Well what kind of federation is it handling atm? Because saying Elixir is awesome means nothing until you have 1000 MAU's all tooting and hollering at the same time, and you have to federate a bunch of messages.

That's where I actually like having the sidekiq component separate and scalable. Because it means I can make use of dynamic scaling in a cloud to work through the queues, then scale down when the queues are empty.

The Mastodon web service can run on minimal resources, even with 1000 MAU's, it's only Sidekiq that needs to scale, and that also only when there is large amounts of messages to federate.

pimeys7• 4 years ago

My question is, why do you need separate processes to handle mostly async operations? You need to do HTTP requests and database queries, that is mostly waiting, there is no CPU needed for this. You can do it with one process and millions of tasks operating in concurrent fashion.

I don't really know how Mastodon does this with the Sidekiq, but what I've seen people with a very small amount of activities (we're talking about hundreds of thousands, or a few millions), need to do manual scaling of Sidekiq processes or threads. As a user, you should not be tuning these metrics to handle this kind of activity. A single beam process could handle all the WhatsApp messaging back in the days, so it can easily handle our relatively tiny fediverse servers with much less users.

_cenw3• 4 years ago

It's a Pleroma fork, so I'd say it handles it pretty well.

rsolva• 4 years ago

Mastodon offers a lot of great features but at a high computational cost. I settled for GoToSocial for my personal instance, and although it is still in alpha, everything I need is there and it is stable and barely uses any resources. The setup and maintenance/upgrades is simple since there is very few moving parts, which makes it perfect to host on my home server.

I tried, and gave up, setting up Mastodon several times in the past as I got choice paralysis from all the different ways to set it up. That was a few years ago, but from what I hear, it is still a somewhat daunting task.

cuu508• 4 years ago

The hidden cost of storing data for Mastodon on S3 is the Requests. There are so many requests! I’m seeing about 40-50K requests per day!

There are S3-compatible object storage providers that have no per-request fees, and significantly lower bandwidth and storage fees. Examples – OVH, Scaleway.

I had an use case for object storage where my service would be uploading tens to hundreds of small objects per second, 24-7. Running some napkin math, it looked like AWS S3 costs for me would have been in the hundreds. I went with OVH, and have a €1 monthly bill for the object storage :-)

aprdm3• 4 years ago

That's really cool! Seems like as the comment on your blog said, you could try to template it and perhaps offer Mastodon as a service on AWS? :)

Thanks for sharing.

baeaz• 4 years ago

You have to have some big balls to run a Mastodon server on AWS. You are just one pissed off guy away from a bill that will cost you dearly.

raffraffraff2• 4 years ago

Oracle Cloud "always free tier" has 24G of memory, 4 ARM CPUs, 200gb block storage, 200g object storage, a load balancer and some database stuff (may or may not be useful). I've been running a 4x node Kubernetes cluster for over a year, mostly for fooling around with.

death916• 4 years ago

I was able to get a free x86 box but it's been impossible for me to get an arm instance on the west coast always out of space. Otherwise oracle free tier is pretty ncie

raffraffraff2• 4 years ago

I had the same issue after shutting down my instances. I wrote a simple bash loop to recreate them and left it running overnight. All instances were up by the morning. I haven't shit any down since then. Reboots are fine.

unity1001• 4 years ago

Host at Hetzner or DO. AWS costs are outrageous.

notacoward2• 4 years ago

I love Mastodon, or more accurately the fediverse in general. However, running your own instance seems like a loss in every possible way. It costs money, even if it's not much. It's work, even if it's not much. It incurs risk and liability. And it's functionally worse than being on a shared instance. Larger instances will take forever to federate with you, if they do at all. Your local timeline will be empty. You'll even have to jump through hoops to see all of the replies to posts, since the default is to show only replies from instances you've already federated with. If you often feel like you're only seeing half the conversation it's because you really are.

Lastly, the more people run their own instances, the worse everyone's experience will get. The fediverse almost entirely relies on direct communication between instances with no DHT or other mesh routing overlay, so messages are O(n^2) relative to number of instances. Caching works OK for assets but not for ActivityPub RPC, so many instances don't even implement it at all. One of the main reasons the large instances struggle so much is that these communication patterns drastically increase traffic volume and queue length, which is further exacerbated by the fact that Sidekiq (the part of Mastodon that handles those queues) is a poorly implemented tuning nightmare.

The best bet IMO is to join one of the medium-sized instances aligned around a community or vibe that you like (I'm on hachyderm BTW and it's awesome for me). Smaller ones have all of the problems I've mentioned above, while the very largest are sub-optimal in terms of both technical UX and social atmosphere. Goldilocks wins again.

unshavedyak2• 4 years ago

Yea this has been bothering me. I have to fight to ignore the desire to run my own and just enjoy my medium-sized instance.. because any interest i get in Mastodon itself makes me want to rewrite it to run more lean and allow users to contribute costs (P2P data).

I quite enjoy Mastodon, but the whole thing feels.. incorrectly aligned with technical needs. I hope the attention it's getting leads to core implementations more aligned with the community.

barbariangrunge• 4 years ago

I find my aws billing statements to be so confusing that I lean towards other cloud platforms for my personal projects. Whenever I can at least. It is easier to create a set of load balanced servers involving a dozen aws services than to understand a bill on there

hiddencost• 4 years ago

Digital ocean has a premade droplet that is costing me $20 / mo.

jherskovic• 4 years ago

I run a self-hosted instance for a bunch of friends. It's on a VM on a 10-year old homebuilt TrueNAS server.

For added entertainment, I installed it manually on FreeBSD, because I like playing old-school 'I do things by hand' sysadmin at home.

It's connected to the world through a free Cloudflare tunnel. I have a residential fiber connection. It doesn't use S3, it just dumps files to the filesystem. I did clamp down on federation settings, and it purges old content aggressively so federated content doesn't make the hard drives metaphorically explode. One user following someone on mastodon.social and you can see storage usage climb by gigs a day with defaults.

After the initial setup it's been honestly quite painless. It just works. If people start relying on it, I'll probably move it to masto.host.

skwheel• 4 years ago

For compute - a single Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) t4g.small instance running Mastodon, it’s PostgresSQL database, and Redis.

its

insane_dreamer• 4 years ago

A premade Mastodon CloudFormation template would be cool for those who want to set up their own.

jancsika3• 4 years ago

Let's say I just want a single-user instance that's in the style of Hacker News: text only.

1. I want to write text-only posts and have them distributed to whoever is following me on Mastodon.

2. I want to receive all the posts of people I follow, and then just display/store the text and nothing else.

Does something like this exist? Seems like it should be super slim and easy on resources.

zimpenfish6• 4 years ago

Honk - https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

Minimalist and opinionated but is a single binary with an SQLite db. Source is, uh, esoteric but is definitely hackable (there's a whole bunch of forks.) Seems to work ok with a few minor weirdnesses[1].

Should clarify that it doesn't have an API - you can't use Mastodon clients against it (until/unless someone writes on) - it's basically web only.

[1] I can't follow someone on my GotoSocial instance from honk but I'm pretty sure I've debugged that as being GTS's fault[2] rather than honk.

[2] They made many odd design decisions which cause(d) issues with federating to other systems.

[edit: clarify that honk as no API]

boyter• 4 years ago

The source is indeed esoteric, and sometimes hilarious. I have been using it to learn how the auth works against mastodon and some other parts of Activitypub. I do recommend it as a decent starting point to learn from.

Ambroisie• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate on some of gotosocial odd choices?

jancsika3• 4 years ago

[1] and [2]

Ugh!

Is there a fork that just uses whatever stupid key/keysigning choices are needed to play well with the maximal number of other federated thingies?

I'm just going to be sending out a single post per day, tops. And perhaps reading whatever single digit number of people I decide to follow (maybe double if I'm really bored).

If I have to generate and send private keys in the clear to get this done I honestly couldn't care less.

Edit: clarification

0x420• 4 years ago

It’s comforting to know that even people who work at AWS will sometimes forget about runaway cloudwatch charges. it's not just me!

wkat42423• 4 years ago

GoToSocial seems to be a much better fit for a single user instance and it should be able to run on a scaleway stardust instance for €1.80 a month.

I was considering running mastodon too but someone mentioned this here and it does indeed look great

SergeAx• 4 years ago

This is so cute! Cartel employee talking about using their drugs)

AWS is the most vendor-lock dependent company, IMO. Every single "architect solution" of their is a recipe of how to never get your data back for free.

woopwoop24• 4 years ago

i don't get why people would choose AWS in the first place ever for any small/amateur project. It is ridiculously expensive, not transparent about the costs which could be coming your way and you need a shitload of components to get by. just get some fixed price machine at some shitty provider and see how it goes, if you need a bigger one, just by a bigger machine. And if you outgrow that it might be a reasonable idea to just rent some colo space and calculate the upfront costs against a small server you build yourself. an intel nuc with 16gb memory and 4 cores is about 200$ and draws nothing in power. buy 2 connect them direct and hook them up to the colo provider. unlimited fiber and there you go. AWS is such a joke

How much I’ve spent so far running my own Mastodon server on AWS

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