Matt WilcoxJun 11

If you use Mastodon; please pay for your use. Please.

This is not the corporate web of Twitter and Google. No company is paying for your use of this service. Your use of the service is not being sold to ad companies.

You use it? That is costing your admin owner literal actual money.

Pay for things you like. Or they go away. Or they stay but get taken over by exploitative people that will eventually destroy it.

Please, find your instance owner and pay them some money.

Thanks.

Show threadNoahJun 11

@mattwilcox Adding my two cents here as someone who runs an instance. I don't think most folks realize how much of a hog on resources running Mastodon ends up being and how expensive it is to keep afloat. A basic server requires elasticsearch, redis, nginx, and PostgreSQL, not to mention whatever monitoring you might have put in place to make sure you're made aware of server issues.

My instance is SUPER tiny, I've got all of 8 people on it and only 4 of them are active and my Linode VM is barely hanging on at 8 GB of memory and 4 vCPU. If you're on a popular instance, the bill to keep everything humming is going to be high. So folks who are putting out requests like this, they're not exaggerating those numbers, it costs a lot of money to keep a popular Mastodon instance running.

Show threadts šŸš‰
@monkeyninja @mattwilcox Iā€™m curious about the average mastodon instance. Sure, I can see popular ones requiring several hundred dollars/pounds each month to run. But many are quite small
Jun 11 at 1:52pmWeb
Show threadNoahJun 11
@tsyum @mattwilcox That's the thing though, I don't think there really is an average where Mastodon is concerned because of its decentralized nature. There are certainly ways I could scale back the resources for the front end by moving some of the services so I'm not operating on an "all my eggs in one basket" config. e.g. use an external Redis cluster, external PostgreSQL service, etc. But then I'd be shifting to multiple service layers and that would likely increase the overall cost rather than decrease it. It would likely dramatically improve the performance of my server though.