some guy: "3$/month hosting was too expensive for Mozilla"
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mx alex tax1a - 2020 (4)replied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus none of these dweebs really have an answer to us when we say that we find it easier to host our own email than to host our own activitypub software.
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Joby (chaotic good)replied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus Honestly this. I dipped my toe into self-hosting and tbh Mastodon is kind of embarrassing when it comes to efficiency. Especially when it comes to storage, I mean jfc.
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@jenniferplusplus
Yeah, I don't know what the future path of Fediverse looks like. The current way feels unsustainable for much of anything besides basically small instances that have some friendly sibling instances. Basically like discords with some shared channels. A global network just doesn't seem to be something that volunteers can keep up with. -
Anna Wilson 🏳️⚧️replied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus [Emphatically not speaking for my employer.]
I've seen some people from non-profit network orgs talk informally about running Mastodon servers. We have plenty of compute and bandwidth available to us.
As far as I know, none have gone for it, because sustainably and reliably moderating this sort of thing, on a fast reaction time, is quite far from our usual expertise.
Not commenting directly on Mozilla, but supporting your point that it's about more than hosting.
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@JessTheUnstill exactly. We're probably over capacity for what volunteerism and donationware can sustain. Something has to give. If we don't start lowering the burden of running them, servers are going to start shutting down. And eventually it has to be financially self-sufficient, which includes paying a lot more people for their labor.
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Anna Wilson 🏳️⚧️replied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus @JessTheUnstill Hmmm.
Fediverse is 100% not the first internet project to be faced with this kind of dilemma. There are some models for how this can be done.
Gonna think about this & prob post a thread later.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Anna Wilson 🏳️⚧️ last edited by
@yesitsanna @JessTheUnstill
I have plans for features that would be worth paying for without turning unpaid users into a 2nd class citizenry. Storage for high quality media. Analytics. Single sign-on and limited shared access to accounts. -
@[email protected] THANK YOU
I'm not thrilled about the decision. But it's not like they ever said anything more than "it's an experiment because we're interested in this" - as far as I'm aware.
It really feels like people are finding every excuse to go after Mozilla. That's not the way to do this. Criticise the harmful decisions, reward the good ones, and things like this? IMO, let it go.
It's not like they're leaving social media. This isn't about accountability. Presumably, they just decided they weren't properly equipped (or willing) to administrate a fully-fledged federated social network in the long term. -
@NotThatDeep yeah, all of this. There's also the more cynical theory that decentralized social media was a speculative gamble that didn't grow into a bubble like they hoped.
I'm inclined to think it's some combination of all of the above.
Regardless, this is a pretty neutral event.
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Noah Kennedyreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@jenniferplusplus as someone who does a fair amount of performance engineering as a part if his day job, i really wanna emphasize the second point
while compute would bever have been all that expensive for mozilla compared with salary costs, mastodon is very expensive to run technically
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@jenniferplusplus i have done a lot of performance engineering on my mostly single-user instance, and i can comfortably run this on a couple of raspberry pis with cloudflare r2, but honestly it's insane how resource intensive this is given the tiny volumes of traffic it manages
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@jenniferplusplus an instance with a couple hundred users could easily break hundreds for monthly hosting costs, especially when you consider that most admins are probably hand-tuning tuning container cgroups limits in a k8s cluster to get mastodon to consistently feel fast while still getting resource utilization ratios competitive with what major tech companies aim for
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@jenniferplusplus I get a $150 monthly credit from msft for my work's enterprise plan that I ran my old single user instance on and there were times it got shockingly close to running out of credit. Can't imagine the costs of large instances.
And then there are the time costs of maintaining updates. Every time mastadon would drop a patch I'd have to set aside an evening to get it updated. So it doesn't even scale well for time constrained individuals on single user instances
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@Cregg @jenniferplusplus I definitely don't think it's as easy or cheap as it needs to be; but do you happen to know where that $150 ended up going? so far I've been pretty successful with my single/personal instance on a $20/mo VPS, but maybe something's gonna take me by surprise?
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@eigen @jenniferplusplus it's been a while so I don't really recall. I did some messing around with relays so it may be related to that
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@Cregg ah, I've heard those lead to a lot more resource-consumption. thanks for the info
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Matt Panaro last edited by
@eigen @Cregg relays certainly change the math.
Even without that, it's hard to characterize because the most significant scaling factor is the number of open relationships. Sending posts to followers can easily saturate your worker threads. Handling inbound posts/likes can also easily saturate your worker threads. Both things put load on redis, so scaling up workers requires scaling up redis. Timelines also get precomposed and stored in redis, so even inactive users add load there.
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Jenniferplusplusreplied to Jenniferplusplus last edited by
@eigen @Cregg it seems like load on postgres is really bursty, so you have to provision for big peaks.
And then media storage and egress seems to be the other thing that runs up costs. Mastodon fetches, caches, and serves remote media in most cases. So you pay for media that wasn't even uploaded by your users.