Mastodawn

KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

If any Mastodon instances are having trouble with their costs growing out of control, ping me and see if I can help lower your bill.

Apparently a recently closed instance was paying $300/month for hosting which is insane to read considering how small of an instance it was. When we had 40k monthly users I was paying about $120/month so an instance with less than 400 total users (not MAU) should be super cheap to run even with a few TB of storage and bandwidth.

It hurts my heart to read instances closing down over costs and finding out they’re paying more than instances 10x their size. 😢

https://newsie.social/@jeff/114513118997692099

Jeff (of the internet) (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Another Mastodon server gone. Airwaves.Social shut down & off the air for good. Reason: Costs! https://vmst.io/@User47/114508192446827453 Running a Mastodon server isn’t free & it’s often thankless. But it is essential. If you value independent, community-run spaces, now’s the time to chip in to your favorite server/instances Your server admins can’t keep the lights on with vibes alone. Want to Suport Newsie or Journa.host? DO IT! OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/newsiesocial#category-CONTRIBUTE PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=BCV5VZ5HRMB3U

Newsie

@KuJoe I decided a while ago that the most I would pay to host https://toot.works was $20/mo. I kept new registrations open until I reached a point where I felt like it was the maximum number of users the instance could support, and then I closed new registrations. I see pleas for help with $2,000 monthly bills, and I think that would be just terrifying.

Toot Works

Toot Works is for folks who make things. It provides a collaborative opportunity to build lasting relationships within a supportive creator community.

Mastodon hosted on toot.works

Blain Smith May 15, 2025

@[email protected] @[email protected] I feel like this is par for the course for the official Mastodon project. Other options like GoToSocial and snac should take MUCH less to operate. Mastodon just feels bloated.

@blainsmith @joe @KuJoe aside from just not being written in a terribly efficient manner mastodon is written in ruby and ruby is SLOW, about the only language that executes slower is perl

KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

@raptor85 @blainsmith @joe thankfully it doesn’t need to be fast since it scales well, just throw more Arm cores at it and your good to go. 🤣

@KuJoe @blainsmith @joe yeah, or they could have written it in a ...erm..."fast"...language like java (that was actually painful to say) and gotten upwards of a 10x speed increase off of language inefficiencies alone (ruby is actually SHOCKINGLY bad, like it's not a small difference), making some of these massive instances needing beefy servers likely able to run on raspberry pi level hardware. There's a reason mastodon's competitors are WAY cheaper to run.

KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

@raptor85 I am very thankful my instance is smaller now, when it was processing >15 million Sidekiq jobs per day it really needed like 6-8 CPU cores to keep up sometimes. But now that I know it doesn’t care about core speed and just core count, I’m glad to know I can throw some Arm CPUs at it for a few bucks and be good for a long time.

Blain Smith May 15, 2025

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] cough Go cough Rust cough 😏

Caching all media is rather nuts though too. I get the appeal, but the cost seems to outweigh the benefits.

KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

@blainsmith I agree, if I didn’t have Backblaze and Cloudflare my costs would easily be double what I pay now just for storage and bandwidth.

Even now I’m paying like $15/month and I barely use 2TB of bandwidth and only have 2.3TB of storage.

@blainsmith @raptor85 @KuJoe The media caching hasn't been a big deal for me. I'm using 1/5 of my allotment for media storage but 3/4 of my allotment for database storage.

KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

@joe I wish I could reduce my DB size! I would love to use managed PostgreSQL hosting because I dislike DBA work, but managed DB services are too expensive right now if you need a lot of storage.

Emil Jacobs - Collectifission Jun 1, 2025

@blainsmith I was just about to ask why there isn't a project aiming to rewrite Mastodon in Rust, C, or whatever, and then I realised that snac is essentially doing that 🤔

@raptor85 @KuJoe @joe

@collectifission @blainsmith @KuJoe @joe I (distressingly) brought up java because it's by far the most common backend programming language still on larger web applications, so the community/library support/etc is already there and ready, and while it's way, way slower than C and somewhat slower than rust it would be the most "practical" choice. (there really aren't many C or rust web devs)

compared to ruby though they're all close in speed, ruby is almost 100x slower in general, ruby is SLOW

Emil Jacobs - Collectifission Jun 2, 2025

@raptor85 If the speed difference is THAT big, I'm wondering why Ruby would be used for anything beyond very small apps and prototyping?

@blainsmith @KuJoe @joe

Blain Smith Jun 2, 2025

There is also GoToSocial (Go) designed for small instances too, but being written in Go it can probably do very well with larger ones. I don't think the original Mastodon author could have predicted it getting as popular as it did so perhaps if one of the original design goals was "scale" he would have not used Ruby. Either way, the more important part is the specification, not the implementation. The more Mastodon API apps that come out the better. So far I've seen them for most languages. Just a matter of what the admins choose to run and support.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

@collectifission @blainsmith @KuJoe @joe

I mean...web developers gonna web developer. I also regularly see gigabytes of javascript pulled in to do things HTML5 supports natively, lol

ruby is a particularly easy language for people who are mostly non-programmers, it's extremely fast to get things like web forms up and running so it's become extremely popular. At a small scale with hundreds of users it barely matters, probably didn't think it would get much bigger than that.

KuJoe 💞Jun 2, 2025

@raptor85 @collectifission @blainsmith @joe

Thankfully the Ruby piece for Mastodon is not demanding so you don’t need a ton of high performance compute to power them. You can just throw a bunch of super cheap ARM CPU cores at it and call it a day.

filipa mv Jun 4, 2025

@raptor85 please stop sharing disinformation.

you’re literally on a thread that points out mastodon defaults to a privacy-preserving design that causes *bandwidth and storage* costs to shoot up - and that this can be tweaked.

@phillmv it's not disinformation, ruby is INCREDIBLY slow and vanilla mastodon is a very inefficient implementation, mastodon is severely bloated in storage, cpu, and memory utilization. sure the caching hurts as well, though none of the above thread talks about this, if you're seeing that in the above thread that's due to mastodon's broken threading that doesn't read the same across instances.