"In 2024, it cost $N to run a Mastodon instance with ~1000 active users for a year.

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@joby @tojiro @mekkaokereke what's a good comparison point for the amount of traffic generated?

Like if you're publishing from one to many, are there any comparison points for lighter traffic?

I know one trivial inefficiency is if you have 50 accounts followed by 50 accounts on 50 other servers, and each one publishes one post, it could trivially send 1:1 messages per account (2500/server, 125,000 sender), or optimally send only 50 to each server, or if bundled or gossiped or shared reduce that (though some gossiping increases traffic not reduces it)

Like if your criteria is N hosts must sync M feeds...

There still needs to be that delta of changes over the wire (unless they're sending the complete object twice vs the update) and it's mostly haggling over how fast or batched the send is?

Unless there's some part that's duplicating work somewhere

Or if it's just encoding overhead?

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@joby @tojiro @mekkaokereke or maybe it's caching problems?

Emelia 👸🏻

@risottobias @mekkaokereke @esk @dma that range is based on information from a half dozen large instances based on their expenses

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Emelia 👸🏻

@puppygirlhornypost2 @risottobias @mekkaokereke @esk @dma hachyderm uses digitalocean spaces, but has a custom CDN on top

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Emelia 👸🏻

@puppygirlhornypost2 @risottobias @mekkaokereke @esk @dma yeah, reads and deletes can be expensive

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@thisismissem @puppygirlhornypost2 @mekkaokereke @esk @dma wasabi charges for not keeping an object to 90 days, so there's also that.

Esk 🐌⚡💜

@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma yup, we could calc the raw infra costs, will do latest tonight, but your range sounds about right.

i'm not aware of anything that would have magically dropped the infra costs (the x, y, nor z). maybe the libvips support reduced cpu somewhat.

mekka has a super key point - the people costs are all $0 in that figure, though, bc it's volunteer. personally, i'm happy to do it as a way of giving back, but reality is, mastodon is hard to make viable if you actually pay people.

Emelia 👸🏻

@esk @mekkaokereke libvips reduces cpu required for conversion, however, does allow for some larger attachments

Jenniferplusplus

@mekkaokereke X is an activity transfer relay. Similar to mail transfer relays, in SMTP.

Y is a shared media storage pool.

Z is automated spam filtering.

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@jenniferplusplus @mekkaokereke I want to believe.

Y+: I've been tooting this horn for too long so I've kind of given up, but I think it's one of the highest priorities to resolve for admins as a whole... not very high for devs it seems tho so who knows.

Z+: akismet for AP (shared threat data).. SEO spam account has a common username/email/ip/URLs in profile/posts

A SEO spammer shoudn't be able to move from instance to instance... share that data around

Eashwar

@mekkaokereke I feel like pooling storage could be very useful since a lot of servers are storing copies of the same media (see jortage.com). Media storage, CDN, and transfer bandwidth make up a huge amount of cost in running servers.

Emelia 👸🏻

@e_nomem @mekkaokereke @esk could be interesting to experiment with operating something like jortage? Would probably need a webhook/events queue to setup tasks for checking contents uploaded (as to limit liability)

Les Orchard

@mekkaokereke Along with pooling storage, it'd probably make folks on the rest of the web happy if mastodon instances pooled opengraph / preview card fetches. Maybe through shared caching proxies or protocol tweaks. Anything to cut down the thundering herd every time a link is shared.

Esk 🐌⚡💜

@thisismissem ah so prob a wash, eh?

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@mekkaokereke reading these posts.. I hope 2025 is the year of shared services on the fediverse.

shared community / co-operation services are not centralisation you zealots. Don't @ me.

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@shlee @mekkaokereke plus it could be "requires manual approval from somebody on your server"

like... server ABC limited domain 1. your server mods get notified and they can either agree or disagree.