HACKER Q&A
📣 CharlesW

Best guides for hosting Mastodon/ActivityPub server for 5000-1K users?


I'm a reasonably-experienced community manager, but definitely not an experienced sysadmin, and a noob when it comes to Mastodon. I've joined an instance and it's clear there's lots of promise there, and with many people looking for an alternative to Twitter I'd like to provide a federated home for a couple of communities.

Are there good guides for hosting Mastodon from 0 to 500-1,000 users (and potentially beyond)? I'm trying to avoid making stupid mistakes, like using a provider's "1-click installer" and then discovering that I'd hit a capacity wall quickly and have to start over, or choosing an architecture that would quickly become prohibitively expensive. Basically, I'm hoping for a map with recommendations and "here there be dragons" information.

Something like masto.host could be interesting, but their prices seem a bit high and all of their plans are currently unavailable anyway. I've read https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/, but it's missing even basic sizing guidance. I found what appears to be an official Docker image at https://hub.docker.com/r/tootsuite/mastodon, but no instructions on using it.

Any feedback is welcome, thank you!


  👤 simfree Accepted Answer ✓
Stop. Running a large instance for people you don't tangentially know for hundreds of people or worse yet thousands of people is a bad idea.

The Fediverse has had plenty of instances come and go, the last thing needed is a large, poorly moderated instance costing you significant money for servers, S3 compatible storage, etc.

Participating in an existing community run instance to make use of your community management skills would provide much more value to the Fediverse, and coincidentally you won't be the single point of failure with no backup (which causes burnout).

Doing both server maintenance and moderation at scale is unreasonable for one person IMO. But I've only spent half a decade on the Fediverse now...


👤 CharlesW
A great article published after I posted this, by Kris NĂ³va (GitHub, formerly Twilio). She self-hosts hachyderm.io, which currently supports 6,000 users:

https://medium.com/@kris-nova/hachyderm-infrastructure-74f51...

Forward-looking Hachyderm infrastructure requirements: https://hackmd.io/qrR8obReTlaHkQXkHQNXJw