What happens when you have your own Mastodon instance (just for you) where over 21,000 people follow you and when youโre following over 4,300 people?
You end up paying ~โฌ50/month for Mastodon hosting ๐
It also opens up interesting questions: what happens when a popular account joins your instance (hint: it will probably cost the instance maintainers quite a bitโฆ I donโt envy the mastodon.nu folks right now).
This stuff is never free anywhere but the scale of Big Tech insulates you from it somewhat.
I actually think itโs good to be reminded that our ability to communicate comes with a cost โ in terms of resources, environmental impact, etc., not just money.
But, equally, it also makes the case that a system optimised to host hundreds of thousands of people on a single instance is not also somehow magically optimised to host just one person.
The latter is the problem Iโm exploring with #SmallWeb.
@gert @aral I agree about the protocols bit. I managed some of the infrastructure and I work with some of the other infrastructure that makes Youtube. The amount of bandwidth required to do youtube (or netflix if we go back a few years) would crush the internet. P2P increases this problem dramatically.
Peertube is cool for what it is, but it fundamentally cannot handle a substantial fraction of YT's volume. We'd need to leverage caching more.
@gert @aral IDK if it exists. What makes youtube work is a series of expensive hierarchical caches distributed globally. There are parts of the world where this network is thin and youtube is really a suboptimal experience.
I dunno if folks really realize how much geography affects their internet. Odds are, most Americans have participating caches peered with their provider's hardware.
@supersingular @gert @aral I'm not sure what's been publicly shared, so I can't say more. As my job at Google works directly with these in some cases (and for awhile I was oncall for something similar to them but not quite the same), I know quite a lot more than the public does.
You can infer a lot about how SSL certificates are managed by media CDNs by examining the certificates, if you're curious. That info is public by necessity.
@realcaseyrollins Yeah, as far as I know, Pleroma is much more tuned for the small instance/single-tenant use cases.
Although, ActivityPub itself, of course, isnโt.
@aral maybe some sort of peering?
Itโs possible if all the celebs join one instance the cost will have a plateau, because Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez are followed by people on the same servers.
- 7 days for media files in posts
- 30 days for preview cards in links
- 90 days for preview cards in other media types (videos/photos)
@aral Great food for thought regarding Fediverse economics. I think it makes for a compelling argument to investigate Mastodon alternatives.
Iโm considering starting a Pleroma instance. It seems to be a lighter weight option, and for whatever feature parity it misses with Mastodon, might make up for that fact being compatible with Mastodon client apps. https://pleroma.social/
@aral this probably mainly demonstrate how resource-heavy Mastodon isโฆ I would be curious to know the result in a lighter software such as Pleroma (which is very similar, feature-wise).
And this is an issue for small hosting and big ones tooโฆ
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@aral I've just today written a blogpost on this topic. Well, not the costs, but the fact that the fediverse is inherently inefficient. And why this isn't a problem (other than higher overall monetary costs)
@aral A single user instance may have trouble just getting a patreon from it's users too. ๐
Is it mostly the people following you or the people you are following I wonder? Easier to cut the people you follow I suppose.
@gruff Iโm mostly like โyou better store it, or else!โ
(Sorry, I donโt get the question. Apparently Iโm using > 20GB of database space โ whatโs taking all that up, I donโt know โ and the masto.host interface shows 0GB of media storage being used, which Iโm assuming is a bug.)
@aral I was just trying to get a handle on where the costs were for your plan. Media storage would normally be the killer, I would have thought, if hosting stuff for others. But if it's just 'busy' because of all your users I guess there's lots of network traffic.
I just thought it a lot of money given the costs of a small OVH VPS self host sort of approach which is less than ยฃ5 a month (40Gb storage and unlimited traffic).
@aral The .nu server must push out each post by [redacted] to almost every instance's inbox by now. That's some thousands of calls with payload. And then handle all the callbacks and validations.
But also handle all incoming requests for each mention and reply. It's a hard time for this server, that's for sure.
What could be done to improve this? Batching? Delaying? E.g. like SMTPs error 451 (not available now, try again later). More proxies?
I guess the fediverse needs to sort this out fast
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