Unless I'm missing something huge, how is $1900/mo for 96GB of database and 700GB of disk storage remotely a fair value? AWS on-demand prices are significantly more affordable than that.
And this is all to support a grand total of 50,000 users? What in the world? Is Mastodon just the most inefficiently written software ever or something?
I feel like it's a bargain social media, both in feature-set and cost.
(I don't understand the server cost breakdown either, and I don't pretend do. Just doing an empirical comparison).
Not trying to be a smart arse - it’s just that the obvious pick (Twitter) has been aiming for revenue from the beginning and haven’t really delivered.
>has been aiming for revenue from the beginning and haven’t really delivered.
In 2021 twitter had 5.08 billion dollars of revenue. Their ad revenue divided by DAU was about $20. No mastodon instance is close to getting $20 per active user per year.
Yes, it's notoriously bad.
The Fosstodon admins run the moderation side, but masto.host (their service provider) is paid to keep the lights on.
I'm not saying they couldn't find a less expensive solution with AWS or Azure, but they need a solution now. They don't have the time to learn a new solution, design the system, and then implement a new backend while people are swarming to their instance. Migrating to another solution (even the above "box") means significant downtime for 50,000 people.