mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

354K
active users

Maybe unpopular opinion: this isn’t sustainable

If you’ve got so many users on your instance(s) that it’s costing you $4k pcm (and however many tens of thousands of dollars he claims to have spent so far) and you need to solicit money from your users/community, this is not “decentralised”

Dan needs to stop amassing users and focus on building the software. Let other admins carry the load of actually running the service
mastodon.social/@dansup/113887

Jayenkai [ J-N-K ]

@WiteWulf Every link that I post, the server gets HAMMERED as every single server that's linked to the original server (eg, your followers on different instances) individually requests the same page.
I posted a link to a NoMansSky image about an hour ago, and it's had 173 requests, 5 of which are from legitimate looking users, and not just a "Mastodon Bot" in the Agent String

@WiteWulf .. eg, this whole thing isn't just costly for the people running instances. It's hitting everyone else's bandwidth/costs, too.

@Jayenkai @WiteWulf 173 requests is utterly nothing unless something is horribly wrong with your software stack. A dirt cheap VPS can handle 10-100x that much per second.

@dalias @WiteWulf

As much as I appreciate that, we're talking about a picture that I linked to myself, with not many followers, and not much interaction.
You know how "X-Celeb posts a link and it blows up and the server craps out, because thousands of people are clicking the link"
.. Imagine that, but nobody's even had time to click it yet, because all the activity has been just the Mastodon instances.

@Jayenkai @dalias I’m thinking out loud here (not telling you what to do or giving advice), but would moving to a smaller instance help? Afaik, mastodon.social is the biggest there is, and federates with *many* other instances. If you wanted to limit the impact of posting links to stuff you self host that could be helpful

@dalias @Jayenkai yeah, 173 requests hardly seems like “getting hammered”, but is that the price you pay for exposure/popularity?

There’s definitely work to be done on the way federation caches and forwards media (this is the slashdot effect born again, in many ways), but CDNs are out of the reach of many fediverse admins 🤔

@dalias @Jayenkai @WiteWulf Try running mastodon on that dirt cheap VPS and see how much requests it can handle. The shoemaker can school others but it ultimately wears the worst shoes.

@Jayenkai@mastodon.social @WiteWulf@cyberplace.social how broken is your server? 173 over the course of an hour is ... not even the background noise of random bot traffic. i get scanned that often just for wordpress vulns.

just yell if you need help setting shit up.

@purple @WiteWulf My server's actually running really quite well, and is typically at <1% CPULoad.
I'm just worrying ahead, for that eventual instance where something gets super-popular.
I'm only being followed by 268 people. That's an alarmingly high percentage.
If someone "big" followed me and retooted, and then their followers do... it all expands exponentially, at an alarmingly rapid rate.

@Jayenkai@mastodon.social @WiteWulf@cyberplace.social yeah it's exponential, but the internet is well versed with handling the slashdot effect. your shit should be locally cached heavily, boiling the work down to a call to redis if it's mastodon we're talking about.

this isn't nearly the problem you seem to think it is, at least on a properly configured instance with properly configured infra backing it.

@Jayenkai @purple if you’re using commercial hosting where you pay for bandwidth you need to have a bandwidth cap in place to avoid unpleasant surprise bills. It’s always a risk with anything you post online that’s not access restricted in some way

@WiteWulf @purple
I'm hearing all this, and I'm ok with all this, but my head is linking this to "It's just cosmetic" I.A.P's.