Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

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I thought about running a Mastodon instance in my VPS since i do not really like the idea of relying on others to decide what i should or should not be able to see, but i ended up changing my mind once i saw what it actually needs to run... for a service that is essentially flinging short pieces of text around every now and then, it has way too high requirements and too many dependencies. I run a web site, a bunch of repositories, email, gopher, ssh and a bunch of other stuff on my VPS yet i barely scratch 200MB of RAM use (and most of it is spamassasin) whereas i'm not even sure it fits Mastodon's minimum requirements. If i try it i have a feeling it'll take over the entire thing.

If there was a server-only (no web-based client), super lightweight version that talked the Mastodon protocol and didn't require much in terms of functionality, i might have tried it. It kinda sounds like Go was made for projects like this, so i hope someone eventually makes one :-P.

There is Pleroma, which aims to be a Mastodon-compatible platform which will run even on a Rasperry Pi: https://pleroma.social

It also separates front- and back-end, so it might come close to your „server-only“ idea.

Looks interesting, thanks. I'll try to check it later.

Mastodon is really easy to run via Docker containers. I use the official container with three instances (web, streaming, sidekiq), a postgres container, an elastic search container and a redis container. I wrote these scripts to help bring it up, but you could do the same thing with Terraform + docker-compose:

http://github.com/sumdog/bee2

It's super easy to run compared to Plreoma (which took me forever to Dockerize, the dockerfiles are in the same project). Years ago this was the problem with Diaspora too, but Docker has made this problem a lot easier.

I even have a container that backs up my volumes and database to Backblaze. If you want easy, cheap hosting, there's Masto.host.

Edit: I run on a $10 Vultr instance with some additional block storage and currently support <10 users without issue.

I already have a VPS, i do not really want to use another one just for a single program (imagine if everything i wanted to run needed its own VPS).

Also i do not really want to run docker in there... aren't dockers VMs themselves? Isn't this running a VM in a VM? Doesn't that kill any sort of performance?

TBH as i wrote above what i'd prefer is some self-contained binary i drop somewhere in my VPS and have it work automatically. See Fossil SCM and Gogs as a couple of examples for what i'm looking for.

Docker is NOT a VM. Anything in a Docker container runs with the exact same performance as a service installed on your system. Docker does introduce problems, but performance is not one of them. I've done a pretty detailed post on how Docker works over here:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-wit...

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