My costs are more like $18/month.
Mastodon instances with 10's of thousands of users is a TERRIBLE idea for the long term viability of the service.
Is the performance that bad?
Sounds like it's easy to install on the cloud. Would it make sense to run it on a home server with a good broadband consumer internet connection like fiber?
Is there a lot of traffic normally, pushing or pulling or polling?
1. Moderation issues, primarily with regards to federation between instances. As an admin it's much harder to moderate with tons of users in a consistent manner, and as a user it's hard not to get screwed over by overly reactive admins either on your instance or other large instances banning your instance. I've seen tons of "guilt by association" bans on mastodon, hell I've seen people judging and domain blocking people based on the SOFTWARE they use (because they dislike the politics of that developer - not because anything that anyone on the particular instance did).
2. Privacy concerns, especially around how mastodon handles "private messages". When you are on a server that everyone is sharing a niche hobby there is a HIGHER possibility that your admin may snoop on your messages out of curiosity (or whatever justification they can generate).
3. Costs both $ and resources on these larger instances. Eventually someone will need to pay a bill and $$ pressures can lead to bad decisions.
In my opinion people should be:
1. Generally having their own stand alone instance. 2. Sharing an instance with close family / friends 3. Having secondary accounts on company / organizations instances 4. Having a read-only account on one of the larger instances just to assist in searching, discovery, etc.
Oh shit did I just ROBODOX you, buddy?
There's also Pleroma (the Akkoma fork is recommended) and Misskey.
There are people working on server software to be fully a part of Mastodon without spending $30/month. It should be possible to do this much more efficiently.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pleroma/comments/yu8xof/pleromas_re...
I wonder what the resource requirements of that look like compared to the default Mastodon thing.
Finally an honestly named piece of software.
If I'm already running a moderately sized $30-or-so-per-month server with its own local database process, that's not very busy. Should it fit on that kind of system just fine, or does it need a lot of CPU, memory, disk space, and/or network bandwidth? Or do you think I'd have to upgrade to a 50-or-so-per-month server?
Again, not planning on having many people use it, but I'm just wondering how much baseline and peak overhead there is to just being on the network, along various dimensions.
Akkoma also works with the official Mastodon mobile app.
You can watch your account in your own instance (if someone on your instance has already followed him, which is likely for larger instances). Just go to https://example.org/@[email protected] (replace the domain with your favorite instance's domain).