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So I've been reviewing our server plan here at QOTO to figure ut an upgrade plan...
The mastodon instance itself runs on a 32 gig memory system that is maxed out and thats costing me about 120/month. The bulk of that cost is the result of our very high federation count (we are the top 20 most federated english servers). We have to process so many external statuses it costs a lot of resources. the advantage means when someone posts your posts federates to the maximum number of public feeds possible, so our users have one of the largest voices in the fediverse. It also means we have a huge database of text searchable toots going back years.
If we want to maintain that level of federation the next step is to double our server costs up to 240$ /month. Thats just for the main mastodon server. Our NextCloud, PeerTube, Gitlab, Funkwhale, and other auxiliary services add somewhere to the tune of 500$ / month on top of that.
I guess this is the price of fame :)
@freemo https://i2p.rocks/blog/the-magical-world-of-pleroma-setting-up-your-instance.html
https://blog.soykaf.com/post/what-is-pleroma/
https://fediverse.network/pleroma?count=statuses
"Pleroma is built on a lot less technology than Mastodon. To run a Mastodon instance, you need Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, NodeJS and - if you want search - ElasticSearch. For Pleroma, you only need Elixir and PostgreSQL, while still getting all the features. This simplifies installation and makes maintenance somewhat easier."
"To report trouble, contact href+pleroma.site AT random.sh. Please allow 24 hours for turnaround. Hardware Information. This instance is currently hosted on a Intel Xeon E3-1240 v6 @ 3.70GHz with 64Gb of RAM, 386Gb SSD zfs mirror. The OS is FreeBSD and the instance lives in its own jail." ---nice server. ;)
@design_RG yes but we have many many features mastodon doesnt.. the big one for me is if pleorma supports remote timelines. Since our main objective is to make this instancea persons only instance remote timelines are key to that. Does ploerma have that?
@freemo @design_RG What do you mean by Remote Timeline? A specific TL of a specific instance?
@freemo @design_RG It's not included in the default #Mastodon FE but I wonder if you could transfer the FE you're using now to a #Pleroma instance...
Gleason would probably know more about this tho, he does a lot of development for #Pleroma now IIRC
@freemo
you can think about open the gate of donation. and then public every months' economic report.
That is most of the instance did for the long shot! ^_^
I invested 10,000$ of my own money when the instance went active, I also had donations from others who donate into the open-source community (as we are primarily about opening up STEM and thus why we have a git).
So even at these high costs we have the funds to operate for some time. The money isnt an issue.
@design_RG Its worth a try, but very unlikely to make a huge difference (perhaps enough to cut the memory in half and keep the cost at 120, but thats if were lucky).
Almost all the load comes from the fact taht we have such a large federation footprint. Not just in terms of what servers federate with us, but int erms of the individual posts that get sent to us from throughout the fediverse (which allows us to have features like remote timelines). We process several hundred remote interactions per minute, its huge.
Does pleorma even allow for remote timelines? Does it have subscribe vs follow, does it even have the features we are investing in having I wonder?