@filippo It's apparently not recommended to put a different mastodon solution on the same domain as a previous one. That said, I run a mostly vanilla masto instance here at home. I have a 128gb hdd for attachments, mounted at /home/mastodon/live/public/system (and containing the cache directory). I also run a script to clear out data more than ~14 days old. This all runs on a USFF optiplex from 2012 or so.

If you can't get a static IP, some sort of dyndns solution will do just as well - all you need do is find a cheap VPS that costs no more than £3 a month or so and do your forwarding from it.

@filippo Moving to non-Mastodon software can break a federation as well where you might be lost completely.

I have the same misunderstanding in the design of Mastodon.

Why don't they support resolving the instance by DNS? It would give a chance to have a mastodon instance outside of the main domain. I don't want to expose an ActivityPub data on the main domain, the domain is not related to my Social Media.

Having a unique domain/subdomain for Mastodon makes no sense at all as well. The idea of having domain is to have many underlying services there. We don't need to create unique domains for:
- website
- XMPP
- Email
- etc.
It should be one domain with all those identity services behind it.

It would also give a simpler change to have multiple identities on the same instance. Just like email.

We'd pay some subscription to a public instance (that already have all of those caches/huge db/etc.), with our domains.

As a result, you don't own infra, but you own your identity. If you want to migrate, just switch to another instance (obviously subscribers and posts might require some process).

Most importantly, it would not cost any more for mastodon.social, for instance, to give you a chance to point your domain's identity there.

You should not self-host it, it's too expensive for small batch of users (due to caches, reading history, media, etc.

#mastodon

@filippo welcome to the world on inefficient Ruby-on-Rails apps that overgrow their scope, Sidekiq jobs that flush like they need to scrape the whole Internet, abuse of Redis caching and Postgres databases treated like dumpyards 🙂

I gave up self-hosting Mastodon a few years ago for these very reasons (among others related to their development processes).

I’ve been hosting Akkoma since then and I’m overall very happy. It supports things that Mastodon never implemented too (custom maximum number of characters and profile fields, Markdown and BBcode, custom emoji reactions…). It’s just probably not for the faint of heart, the configuration is a big Elixir script file (and the project itself is written in Elixir), the documentation is not always polished and it may require you to get your hands a bit dirty. But on an instance like mine with a lot of peers it still doesn’t eat up more than 1-2 GB of RAM, and CPU and storage are under control.

For a self-hosting single-user solution with lower entry barriers, GoToSocial is another popular option (but it may not be as feature-rich as Pleroma/Akkoma).

And if you want to stick more to the blogging format, WriteFreely and Madblog are popular options (but of course I may be a bit biased here, being both projects I’ve either contributed to or kickstarted).

Just one little thing to keep in mind: if you have a lot of followers, you follow a lot of people or you joined some high-traffic relays, your storage may also degrade over time. Your db may permanently store a lot of activities and events that you may not even ever see. It’s usually a good practice to schedule object prune/compaction crons on your instance regardless of the software you use.

@filippo
I run an instance with two power users and a dozen others for $30CAD a year. If you get creative and don't mind fiddling with servers, you can easily run Mastodon proper for less than a PDS.

Fiddling with the software can be annoying, hence why many people outsource the task to managed hosting. Of course, now someone else controls your infrastructure and can charge what they want.

As for old posts, GoToSocial/Pleroma should be able to import them without issue. But ActivityPub encourages hard-wired URLs in posts, which can make cross-software migration tricky if you keep using the same domain. GoTo doesn't include a web front end, and Pleroma has a different URL scheme IIRC. It's easy to break access to you old messages.

@filippo

Unless someone is offering managed PDS for $2/month, the comparison is not really fair, is it?

Anyways, if you are willing to accept working with beta-level software, soon (TM) I will be offering hosting for https://activitypub.mushroomlabs.com, which will bring down the operational costs of smaller instances (because it allows multiple domains to share the same infra)

@filippo it’s low hanging fruit that needs the right person to just step up and fix.

I’ve been begging for a while https://shlee.fedipress.au/2024/call-to-action-fediverse-media-server/