Mastodawn

After two and a half years of building this community, I've made the decision that it's time to shut down Astrodon.social.

Since 2022, around 4,000 users have registered on astrodon.social. However, fewer than 10% of those users are active each month, and fewer than 1% post regularly. Because of the way Mastodon works, the data for every one of the those users, even the inactive ones, has to be kept forever and keeps on growing. There's no way to remove posts or archive them out of the database, and running a large database gets very expensive.

Running Astrodon costs more than €300/month, which means that the costs of running the server are primarily going toward servicing fewer than 50 active users, the most active of whom are organisations. Even with donations, Astrodon has now cost me more than €5000 to run.

While I’ve considered the option of turning Astrodon into a commercial service or creating a nonprofit, I’m reluctant to go down that route. Managing a business comes with a host of overhead tasks like tax reporting and navigating different tax regimes due to our global user base, which is something I want to avoid. My goal has always been to create a free and open space, but the reality is that the free part isn't sustainable.

I'm not shutting down Astrodon immediately. I want to give everyone ample time—likely over the next two to three months—to find alternative service providers and transition smoothly. This isn't a decision I'm making lightly, and I appreciate your understanding and support as we navigate this transition. If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me directly through DMs.

Dr. Juande Santander-Vela May 30, 2025

@sebinthestars I’m very sorry to hear that, @sebinthestars, many thanks for the service you have provided… and for giving us a fair amount of time to look for options.

Any idea where you’ll be heading yourself, Seb?

Judy Schmidt Jun 2, 2025

@juandesant @sebinthestars I'm wondering this, myself. I've looked at a couple of instances. Feels like everything around me is fragmenting again and again. It's so depressing.

Seb Potter Jun 2, 2025

@spacegeck @juandesant I’m considering leaving Mastodon and using Bluesky. There’s a more active community there and the experience of using it has a lot less friction than Mastodon.

Knud Jahnke Jun 2, 2025

@sebinthestars @spacegeck @juandesant

Bluesky has all the potential to become like Twitter: very fast, active, but also at the same time very breathless, and - despite claims by the owners - it is not billionaire-proof. They took "crypto" venture capital just recently, their "verification" signup uses Google forms, and they are far from having a working funding model.

If you want to have an account on Bluesky then please don't make it your only one - and keep a foot in the fediverse, please!

Dr. Juande Santander-Vela Jun 2, 2025

@knud @spacegeck agreed! In any case, @sebinthestars, if you move over there, please enable a fediverse bridge… like @bsky.brid.gy, for instance.

Judy Schmidt Jun 6, 2025

@juandesant @knud @sebinthestars @bsky.brid.gy Yup, I agree with the two above. If you go to bsky, keep an account somewhere over here too. Maybe I'll just throw a dart at a list of server names and pick one... the community is certainly a lot more calm over here. I feel like over there there's still a huge motivation to get as many likes and reposts and possible, so it's pretty much at a fever pitch at all possible moments.

Knud Jahnke May 30, 2025

Thank you, Seb, for the service. It shouldn't be a hobby, but at least break even. I will then migrate @ec_euclid soon-ish.

kurt's maze --> ohai.social May 30, 2025

@sebinthestars thank you for your work

Felix Singer May 30, 2025

@sebinthestars Did you consider handing things over to someone else? Or getting support by others?

Olivier May 30, 2025

@sebinthestars, I am not trying to criticise. €300/month is prohibitively expensive even with donations. Sunny.garden is being run for less than 150 CAD: https://hub.sunny.garden/2025/05/05/the-sunny-gardener-april-2025/

Would you be interested in keeping it going with some cost optimizations?

The Sunny Gardener - April 2025

April 2025 review; hosting costs and donations.

Sunny Garden Hub

Brook Miles Jun 3, 2025

@dacmot @sebinthestars happy to share how sunny.garden is set up if you're interested in reducing costs.

There are also a handful of things you can do towards pruning old content out of the database and compacting it, cleaning out old media, etc.

Everything takes time of course, so totally understand if that's a limiting factor.

Seb Potter Jun 3, 2025

@brook @dacmot Thanks for the offer. Even with pruned external statuses and accounts and aggressive table vaccuuming, the postgres db is so large that my only other option is to remove it from managed hosting and admin my own db instance with manual backups and admin. That's a way bigger admin burden than I want to take on.

Maki 🔻May 30, 2025

@sebinthestars Please give this post a look over: https://mindly.social/@KuJoe/114513341094446871

KuJoe 💞 (@[email protected])

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

Mindly.Social

Yaël M. (moved to sciences.re)May 31, 2025

@sebinthestars thank you for keeping this instance running for all this time, it was great! I understand your decision to close it down and I'll move my account to a different instance soon.

For anyone here needing advice on moving, check out this page : https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/

Transferring your Mastodon account to another server | Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse

An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

ESO (old)Jun 2, 2025

@sebinthestars Thank you for running this instance, Seb, much appreciated!

Anthony Horton Jun 3, 2025

@esoastronomy Could ESO be persuaded to run an instance of their own, given the current need to find a new instance as impetus? Maybe just a single user instance for this official account to begin with, then try opening up registrations for ESO staff and see how that goes?

ESO (old)Jun 5, 2025

@spacelizard Hi Anthony. We discussed this among other options before we joined Mastodon. An ESO server that also hosts the accounts of ESO staff is tricky. Our staff's online presence doesn't exclusively revolve around us, which wouldn't justify tying their Mastodon accounts to an ESO server with very specific rules.

It's one of the quirks of Mastodon's architecture, which also affects other "themed" servers. While in principle you can have several accounts in different servers, this isn't ideal and shouldn't be necessary. We think it's more practical for our staff to choose the server that best fits their online presence, and then self-verify their accounts using Mastodon's usual procedure.

We also discussed a single-user ESO server, but for the time being we'll relocate to a different one.

Anthony Horton Jun 6, 2025

@esoastronomy Thanks for taking the time to respond in detail to my thought bubble!

What you say about an ESO staff instance makes sense. I guess that sort of thing is more appropriate to journalistic or similar organisations, where individual staff have more of a public profile and are more likely to want/need an official work-related social media presence.

I feel a single-user ESO instance would make sense though, but appreciate that would be a bigger step than simply relocating to another existing instance.

Michael 🐸Jun 2, 2025

Even though I'm not on astrodon.social, I appreciate everyone who runs a public instance. You're doing a lot of work for the whole Fediverse. So thank you for doing it.

Pᵉtɘr Wᵉil8acher Jun 2, 2025

@sebinthestars Thanks a lot for running #Astrodon! 🤩
I had been aware that you were spending some money, but had not realized that it was that much.😲 Now I wonder how other instances, especially the larger ones, are financing their running costs. 🤔

Haus der Astronomie Jun 2, 2025

@sebinthestars Oh my, guess we are one of those organisations then...

We were not aware the costs to run the server are so high for you, and since contributing in any official way (which would be the only way we could go) wouldn't lift the money burden without creating a bureaucratic one, it's apparently time to look for a new home - but of course not without saying thank you for everything you have done for us!

Prof Heino Falcke Jun 2, 2025

@hausderastronomie @sebinthestars Can you not run an instance on your own servers …? Should be much cheaper. I really don’t want to depend on yet another US company…

Zekovski 🌼Jun 2, 2025

Poke @astro_valoo

@[email protected]
@[email protected] I know you do delete all that stuff regularly to not have that stuff anymore around for inactive users. Maybe you could share the way here...

@menel @sebinthestars You can find my scripts on https://codeberg.org/Windfluechter but @Tealk had picked them up and conducted https://codeberg.org/Fedimins/mastodon-maintenance-tasks

Additionally you may want to look in to "repack" for PostgreSQL, which can save a lot of storage as well.

Seb Potter Jun 6, 2025

@ij @menel @Tealk Thanks, but I already do these cleanups and my problem isn't media storage. In the early days of Astrodon I had 2500+ very active users, some with tens of thousands of followers. Most have since left, but I can't delete them or the related statuses without breaking everything. My statuses table plus indexes is 300GB, and managed hosting is just too expensive.

@sebinthestars @menel @Tealk Why can't you delete them? I'll do that on a weekly basis here as well: the users will be informed by mail after 6 months of inactivity, 4 times, and then the account is marked for deletion... brought my site down from >25.000 users during the great influx to now like 7000 users...

I do host on my own servers and the voluntarily contributions of my users do cover the monthly hosting costs, but not yet the (complete) investment of the servers

Tealk Jun 6, 2025

@ij thanks that reminded me that I wanted to take on the topic, but I don't have that much to delete interesting:

===================================
Starting time : 06.06.2025 14:41:26
Ending time : 06.06.2025 14:41:50
Notified Users: 43
Deactivated : 0
To be deleted : 0
===================================

Kelly Lepo Jun 9, 2025

@sebinthestars Thanks for hosting this community Seb! I appreciate all of your work over the years.

If anyone wants to find me, I've migrated over to @KellyLepo and I'm also on BlueSky @kellylepo.bsky.social‬.

a fading echo Jun 19, 2025

@sebinthestars
I understood there was an automatic deletion of posts period that could be set.

Zi7ar21 Jun 23, 2025

@sebinthestars Thank you for hosting! Astrodon will be missed ;.(

Aaron Jun 26, 2025

@sebinthestars IDK if it's suitable or not in this case, but please give some consideration to an "exit to community" -- conversion to a cooperative, with a transition to someone else managing it, possibly with a payout to you for your prior service if the community has the $$.

#ExitToCommunity
#e2c

Chris Gottbrath Jun 28, 2025

@hosford42 @sebinthestars

Seb -- thanks for all you have done.

I'd certainly be willing to help either with contributions and/or time if there was any option of "exiting to a community supported" model. But I understand that is easier said than done. In any case I love what you have built here and I thank you for creating this gathering place.