John GruberJan 31, 2023

I like the fact that mastodon.social is the biggest instance, but I would leave for an instance that is paid only, say $10/month, has a cool domain name, and thus can afford to raise the rate limits.

Mastodon.social feels like early Twitter both culturally (good), and fail-whale-wise (not good).

Show threadTim BrayJan 31, 2023

@gruber

I'm working with some people who trying to set up an instance which is a member-owned co-op. A bit of spreadsheeting suggests that for a large-ish instance you could run just fine on $5/month.

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@timbray @gruber mmm. I over speccd my instance at $24/mo but now I am using it to lift multiple things. Helps that I am ancient internet era so this is trivial compared to running your own sendmail service. The trickiest thing is deciding how much I want to open it up to other people.
Jan 31, 2023 at 10:29pmWeb
Show threadketanFeb 1, 2023

@scanner @timbray @gruber

Do you spend $24 a month on a cloud-provided machine?

I ask because I instead chose to run a 32 GB machine at my house and that achieves the same purpose: add new services (such as Mastodon and, most recently, Ghost) with minimal incremental cost.

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@ketan @timbray @gruber I am moving almost all of the services I run out of my house to cloud providers. Costs more but at my age I am looking to reduce stress and stuff I have to maintain myself for all the services I run. Tailscale also helps me blur the line between those environments where I feel like I can handle the personal load.
Show threadketanFeb 1, 2023

@scanner @timbray @gruber

I get the sentiment but I am still curious why you think managing 1 machine in the cloud is simpler than 1 at home?

Power maintenance? Or is there something else?

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@ketan @timbray @gruber @timbray I have 10 hours of battery and it is not enough. System maintenance. Hard drives failing. Business quality network to my house is expensive. When I am traveling and anything happens I am screwed. All our email is down. I have five servers and two clusters at home and over 40tb of disk. Just getting out of the business of hardware in the house potentially failing. It is not one more server. It is yet another production service in my home.