Pleroma also isn't RoR and is really designed to scale out better

My understanding is that Pleroma was first and foremost designed to have a small memory footprint for small instances. As an Elixir program running on the BEAM (Erlang) runtime it ought to scale a lot better, but serious work had to be put into that. Not sure it's running on any sites as big as the big Mastodon ones.

[1] has the biggest Pleroma at about 27k users - about 45th biggest according to the list on [2]

[1] https://the-federation.info/pleroma [2] https://instances.social

> Pleroma also isn't RoR and is really designed to scale out better

Sure ... but that's not what I was talking about. It's still talking ActivityPub and that seems, to me, from my low use, few user instance, to be an extremely chatty protocol. I don't know if the ActivityPub traffic scales linearly with users but it would be a not inconsiderable number for 30k users.

Exactly. We're agreeing! That's why I'm not surprised that the mastodon server didn't do so well and that you might get more mileage out of your compute