Mastodon is also an ultra-heavyweight in terms of compute resources it consumes per daily active user served. This is one reason (among multiple) that I would never run Mastodon as an ActivityPub microblogging instance.
Mastodon is also an ultra-heavyweight in terms of compute resources it consumes per daily active user served. This is one reason (among multiple) that I would never run Mastodon as an ActivityPub microblogging instance.
rglullis@communick.news 4 weeks ago
Have you tried running any of the alternatives for more than a few hundred users?
Mastodon is bad for small and single-user instances because it wasn’t designed to serve so few people. Once it starts growing beyond a certain level of activity, most of your overhead is on sidekiq/redis side of things.
I’ve seen the Pleroma devs openly saying that their service can not handle more than 20k users, because they rely on the database to build the timeline and they don’t have a strong caching system.
So yeah, there are a bunch of tradeoffs and Mastodon is not trying to optimize for anything in particular. But once it reaches a certain size the operational cost (per user) does go down.