[bitfolk] Mastodon operational notes (Was Re: Re: BitFolk's Twitter account will move to Fediverse)

Hi Jan, On Thu, Dec 22, 2022 at 09:21:35PM +0000, Jan Henkins via BitFolk Users wrote: My understanding is that this requires the co-operation and ability of the old server to host a redirect for you. i.e. as long as the old server still exists and doesn't hate you, things will automatically redirect, but if the old server disappears off the Internet or its admins decide to take an extreme hatred to you, there won't be a redirect. Not ideal but does at least offer some options for moving around. Clearly it's not of huge concern for a low interaction account like bitfolk@twitter has always been. As someone about one month in to running a Mastodon instance with only me on it, the biggest resource seems to be disk space. Purging media after one week is leaving me running at about 45GiB used for that purpose. If considering running this on a BitFolk VM you probably don't want to pay for that as SSD. Archive storage should be good enough and that is £0.40+VAT per 50GiB per month. Various people have posted about backing the media storage on an S3-compatible cloud store. Of course there is Amazon, but Backblaze offer it as well. Someone was telling me their use of Backblaze B2 was coming out at about $0.53 per month for 100GiB. You can configure Nginx to cache a smaller amount of media and get the rest from the S3 store, so you can still make use of some faster local storage. When messing with cloud storage there is however the risk of some admin task or misconfiguration causing mass metadata changes or downloading which will cost you $$$$ in transactional fees. For example, walking the metadata of every file in a cloud store to see what can be purged to save space has a cost which needs to be balanced against the cost of the space itself. I have never used it but I understand that Minio is an open source S3-compatible storage server, and some people recommend setting that up right from the start. You can then easily move that to a cloud store later, or make another tier of storage that is the cloud store. I should think that anyone intending on running a Mastodon instance with 100+ users on it will need to do it on dedicated servers. Some of the admins posting about their 10,000+ user instances are talking about multiple bits of hardware with 128GiB+ RAM each. IMHO dwarfing all of that will be the amount of time and effort needed to moderate user behaviour, unless you have a very close-knit user community. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting