hugogameiro

From https://masto.host/pricing/ - Under the Galaxy plan 90 EUR/Month: "2000 Active Users (estimated)"

Also, in the 'about the plans' section of that page, under 'Concurrent Requests' and 'Users and Active Users' you have more details. But one can think of concurrent requests limit as actions occurring simultaneously (eg: 50 people clicking a button at the exact same time). Even on the rare occasions when that happens, the actions are queued and take a couple more seconds to process.

I think I understand what you are saying but depending on the use case it is not only usable but it runs great.

I have instances with a couple of thousands of users and it runs smoothly with shared resources.

It really depends on what you want to build. If you want to create an instance for a small specific group of people or you want to open it to the masses. I haven't tested concurrent users but I can tell you from all the instances I run, nobody ever mentioned an issue of slowing down when experiencing heavy traffic.

I have noticed that cPanel has been pushing RoR https://documentation.cpanel.net/display/ALD/Ruby+on+Rails and I haven't tested it or know of the security implications but I am pretty sure that with enough tweaking one could install Mastodon on a cPanel server with other apps running in PHP.

Instances are not equivalent to servers. Just because you have 2000 instances, you don't need 2000 servers to run it. Just like you don't have a single server per WordPress install.

For example, I have 100 Mastodon instances running using 8 VMs at https://masto.host/

I can tell you that a VM with 2vCPUs can run 30 small instances easily (CPU load average under 50%) as long as you have 1GB of RAM for each.

So, if you have a server running, I am sure you can add Mastodon to it and the only thing you will notice is the 1GB of RAM usage. If you want to install it for a small group of users, just find a sharing hosting space like mine or go with a $3 VPS and you will be more than fine.

You can split Mastodon to several servers easily. Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, Streaming API, Puma, Nginx and Media Storage can all be placed on different servers. Even multiples for each. You can read here about https://medium.com/@Gargron/scaling-mastodon-1becde463090 how Eugen had Mastodon.social running a few months ago.

You don't need a lot of resources to set up an instance. Mastodon runs easily with less than 1GB of RAM and 1vCPU. Also, you can even install it in a shared server, like you do say a WordPress. I have a hosting service dedicated to Mastodon https://masto.host/ where I host around 100 instances in shared environment in a Cloud of 8 VM.