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Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

I really wish more libre-social apps would support serverless deployment options. If I were to deploy a personal Mastodon instance on Heroku, it would be, what, close to $30/month? Shared hosting from a provider like masto.host is $6/month and quickly rises with use?

What if there was a CloudFormation stack that quickly brought up Mastodon on API Gateway + Lambda + SQS + S3 + DynamoDB? Costs nothing if you don't post or follow anybody, with slowly rising costs as you use Mastodon more, and basically no ops concerns? Wouldn't that eliminate most of the technical barriers (cost, ops hassle, albeit still some setup hassle) for promoting federated social?

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Mastodon is quite light weight, I don't see how you could possibly need a $30 server for that.

$6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage. If you need more storage, find a cheap S3 host and use that with Mastodon for file storage.

I don't quite see the point of going Amazon specific with an open API like this but I'm sure you can implement ActivityPub using whatever Amazon offers. You'll probably start racking up a bill quite quickly though. I don't see how using AWS is possibly a lower technical barrier when there's a docker-compose file ready to use already.

> $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage.

Pretty reasonable, from who though? Also do they support IaC so that you can tear down and rebuild automatically?

Most of the cheap VPS providers I've seen don't provide API access to create/destroy the instance. After it's created, you can bootstrap it for docker with ssh+bash or Ansible giving more options for a consistent deploy flow.

> $6 will get you 4 cores, 8GB of RAM and 200GB of storage.

Wow, where do you get that?

https://lowendbox.com/

Contabo.com. I use two of their servers to self-host some stuff and so far they've been quite stable. There are other cheap providers but they're often of questionable reliability. Luckily you can pay monthly rather than yearly like many other budget VPS providers, which convinced me to try them out back in the day.

Some of the more dependable options for affordable servers, in my experience:

  - https://contabo.com/en/vps/ (they used to have a reputation for overprovisioning, but stable service)
  - https://www.hetzner.com/cloud (they asked me for my ID photos for verification, but otherwise one of the better options)
  - https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (affiliate link, I use them currently for all of my long term hosting)

Another commenter suggested lowendbox, which is a good option for scoping out offers, but sometimes companies just take the money and run off (as happened to me once personally), generally look at whether the company that you want to become a client of has been around for a while and hasn't recently changed hands.

I've lost more than my fair share of servers to cost-cutters. Fuck that. Life is too short.

Also, you can't suggest that everyone should run 4 vCPU/8 GB RAM. Sure, 99% will never need more than that. The 1% who go viral will. If those people have 4/8 servers, because that's what was recommended, then anybody who goes viral will have their server die a fiery death. Behold, the social network's reputation will be that virality is a kiss of death. Watch as everyone leaves in droves.

Federated social needs federation AND spike resilience. Serverless handles your fifteen minutes of fame with ease at a small premium. Discount VPS providers do not.

If cost is concern, consider Elixr-based Pleroma(or its forks), way less hardware requirement with most feature parity w Mastodon.

Ops is good q, based on my observation, most of these implementations has a Dockerfile at best, CloudFormation/K8s is very rarely considered. And probably bc where this community was originated from, Amazon is pretty much suggested against.

Pleroma still requires PostgreSQL which is an overkill for individuals/families. Instead try GoToSocial which is just a golang binary + sqlite db file: https://gotosocial.org/

https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi/

it is able to run properly on a pi so the performance is not a problem

I'm pinning my hopes on GSL - already had to migrate my Pleroma from one server to another because whilst it is less hungry than Mastodon, it is still -quite- hungry.

(The number of "X doesn't work with GSL" issues is mildly worrying, and migrating from Pleroma to GSL is going to make me insane. But hope, nonetheless.)

That page is basically empty. Why is there nothing on it, not even a link to the project?

That's a really unhelpful landing page. Finding their git repo wasn't too difficult. https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

Thanks, I found it after a bit of searching too, but I can imagine most people not bothering. I tried the project and couldn't get their Docker image to work either, looks like the server isn't responding to HTTP requests properly.

> which is an overkill for individuals/families

if your use case is individuals/family then telegram/whatsapp/imessage groups are more than enough.

Not if your audience is the fediverse, but you only want to provide hosting for a few users?

If you host email and a family name DNS/domain - that's still "internet scale" with 3 users?

Even the lightweight server options are very heavy (resources, install process, and/or UI clutter) or are a pain to deploy.

Does a single user server exist? I don't want to host for others, but would like to interact with a few people that have migrated from Twitter.

Are there any resource light servers that can be deployed as a container with a single config or env file that doesn't require many manual commands against a container instance?

Yeah if you don't federate with anyone. Otherwise people will send you stuff to rack up your bill. I say just run it from your house, and use wireguard and haproxy with a VPS to get the traffic to and from the wider Internet if you don't have IPs and/or don't want your home network getting DOSed.

> People will send you stuff to rack up your bill

Sure, but on a personal level, that's still very, very cheap, almost without concern for how much you follow. CloudFront and API Gateway are pennies per million requests. SQS usage would probably fit in the free tier. DynamoDB, if implemented with a single-table design, would probably cost no more than a couple of bucks, and storage would probably fit in the free tier. You can use IAM policy on pre-signed URLs to restrict the maximum object size of an object that someone is sending you, as well as implement effective rate limiting and automatic expiration with lifecycle policies that keep costs under control.

Of course, costs could expand if the user wants to keep an infinite history, but that's their choice, by design.

One of the biggest problems that decentralization faces is that governments have been dragging their feet on mandating IPv6 rollout and IPv4 shutdown :

256 persistent (prefix) IPs is supposed to be the bare minimum for residential customers !

https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690#4-2-2---48-f...

But isn’t that antithetical to decentralization? Would you consider mastodon decentralized if you had to rely on AWS?

If you had to use Amazon, sure. But the option would be nice.

That said, I’ve tried supporting both DynamoDB and an RDBMS with the same software and it was a pain, and this was for something with a less complicated schema then Mastadon. I think what’s missing here is really a scale-to-zero, serverless RDBMS (maybe Supabase or Neon fit the bill?)

I think having multiple deployment stack options will only help more adoption, and is a practical choice that will drive more decentralisation.

Decentralisation isn’t about never running things on a centralised stack. It’s about not having to.

You can set it up on low end servers like from lowendbox.com...

You can get a year worth of 2/3/4 GB ram servers for quite cheaper than heroku or linode.

I have a bunch of servers running and they are not bad.

Like the other commenter said, pleroma is a good lighter alternative and it can be run on raspberry pi if you want

I think it is the hosting providers you are looking at. There are providers at a fraction of what you mention. AWS seems great but before you know it you'll be paying substantial transfer costs.

independent scale to zero services per end user is definitely the play. people can sell their data on marketplaces if they want to cover the few dollars a month of usage fees.

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