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

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God forbid someone do an in depth study of what it costs just for the hardware & connectivity for a mastodon (in particular) instance in terms of active users, instance follows and instance following...

@danhon from the things I’ve read in passing (not a careful study) it looks like a significant cost over time becomes the storage of cached federated content.

It’d be interesting to know if there are services out there for smaller instances to subscribe to shared content caches with other instances?

@babbage @danhon bingo – a lot of people don't realize that servers aren't just storing their own user's media, but also the images/video/etc. of everyone's entire social graph.

cache pooling is actually a really clever idea... it would get rid of some of the decentralization, but sharing a pool with a small circle of people you trust (like a family cell plan!) would make self-hosting a lot more attainable for many people 🤔

@jake @danhon I am guessing this is something that managed housing services like @mastohost do ‘out of the box’ across all instances shared on their infrastructure, and might mean managed hosting ends up a much cheaper option for solo/small instances than true self hosting.

Masto.host

@babbage My testing on that, ended up not working because the cost of maintaining a (fast and reliable) very large database with all files is more expensive than the storage space.

Also, I have automated cache cleaning in place: masto.host/re-mastodon-media-s

But there could be better ways of doing it, I just haven't found one where the CPU/RAM costs are not higher than the storage.

Also, bandwidth costs are many times more significant than storage and those cannot be offset.

@jake @danhon

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