xejt
Can anyone give an idea (however much of a rough estimate) of the cost of running an instance of Mastodon? Like bandwidth, effort in managing etc. I want to see how much it costs to create an open space for people to be social in this format without confirming to the constraints of commercial social media platforms. The idea came from reading about how popular app Apollo is going commercial likely ahead of an IPO which will likely destroy the business model. I understand both sides but I’m trying to wrap my head around overall operating costs.
Jun 7, 2023 at 7:19pmWeb
Show threadsowth Jun 7, 2023

@xejt I haven't run a server and don't know the costs, but if you are worried about that, maybe look into other fediverse softwares too--some of them use less resources than mastodon.

This wikipedia article has a handy list of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse

Though you mentioned Apollo--isn't that a reddit app? If you want a reddit alternative, something like Lemmy may be more of what you want.

Fediverse - Wikipedia

Show threadsowth Jun 7, 2023
@xejt Oh, and if you are really set on a Mastodon server, I think a lot of people use https://masto.host/
Masto.host - Fully Managed Mastodon Hosting

Masto.host was built from the ground up to make running a Mastodon instance easy.

Masto.host
Show threadxejtJun 7, 2023
@sowth thanks much. I will research these. I wasn’t personally looking to host but I was interested to understand what drives the cost of hosting other than just pure bandwidth and storage. Also. I wasn’t clear above, I meant that the cost to Apollo following through with the Reddit API pricing changes coming will likely destroy the Apollo business model. Although one might argue they shouldn’t have built an app based on the good will of another organization permitting them to use an API. As we have seen, people change their minds. Organizations more so. Ill look at these. Thanks.