Regarding [1], do you foresee this changing at some point? I'm interested in self hosting, bit have heard consistently that it is painful, so I've been waiting in the hopes that it will eventually improve.
Hosting Mastodon is as difficult as deploying a traditional web app: if you are familiar with docker, it's just a matter of choosing where you are going to put your database, redis and where to store media.
The problem is that it is expensive. Even if you host on a cheap VPS and put your media on some object storage like Storj (~$4/TB/month), you are problably looking at a minimum of $20/month for the server. If you get for yourself, maybe your friends and stay under 50 users, fine.
If you get more than that then you'll need a beefier server, and if any of users follows lots of media-heavy accounts and does not set it up to delete old posts, your object storage will be full very quick.
Pleroma was recommended to me as a less resource-intensive alternative to Mastodon and with less anti-features. It runs fine with one user on Hetzner's cheapest VPS.
I delete posts mirrored from other servers older than 90 days with a cron job. It has a command to do this.
rglullis|1 year ago
The problem is that it is expensive. Even if you host on a cheap VPS and put your media on some object storage like Storj (~$4/TB/month), you are problably looking at a minimum of $20/month for the server. If you get for yourself, maybe your friends and stay under 50 users, fine.
If you get more than that then you'll need a beefier server, and if any of users follows lots of media-heavy accounts and does not set it up to delete old posts, your object storage will be full very quick.
immibis|1 year ago
I delete posts mirrored from other servers older than 90 days with a cron job. It has a command to do this.
kstrauser|1 year ago