I am thinking about hosting my own Mastodon server from home on a Raspberry Pi (Pi4 8GB)?
- Are there good tutorials out there?
- What’s the annual cost just to host yourself?
If it’s a personal server for yourself and maybe some friends and family, I would rather use GoToSocial, as it is much more lightweight and is less complex to set up and maintain.
I ran my own Mastodon for a while. While it does work, it takes up a ton of storage (every image and video you see is cached by your own server). It also doesn’t work great for viewing stuff like replies and older posts, since backfilling is still not a thing. I ended up just browsing on remote servers instead. A great blog post about this: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/
every image and video you see is cached by your own server
Even videos and images you never see get cached. I barely use Mastodon and my server still uses around 50GB space.
Lemmy is A Lot better in this aspect
Don’t do it with an SD card. It will corrupt and crash after a few months.
With an SSD, yeah it would totally work well. :)
Check out https://masto.host/ for managed hosting.
You can migrate away from them if you ever want to.
If you self host instead, make sure your server is on its own vlan. Servers are a target for exploitation, and you don’t want the rest of your home devices exposed if your server is compromised.
Note: A Pi probably has the CPU power, but the caching from the server may be more space than an SD card will hold.
SD card is a hard no. Need to cram an NVMe hat on it or an external SSD or HDD. They need diskio and a fair bit of quickly recyclable space.
A VLAN is not a security feature. Be sure that your firewalls and routers are configured properly and kept up to date.
Yeah, I meant: isolated vlan
Yeah, this is an important point tbh. Vlans alone don’t add any security if your firewall doesn’t do something to prevent it, as your router will happily forward packets to the next vlan. It should be on a DMZ vlan, meaning traffic is allowed in at the firewall but not to any other internal vlans.
as your router will happily forward packets to the next vlan.
If you allow it. Good routers should block forwarding by default, other than VLAN1 to WAN.
Pretty sure that’d rip your microsd in half really quick.
Don’t know why people insist to run a RPi from a micro SD. Stick a proper SSD into an USB enclosure and be done with it.
Because it’s cheaper (barely but still), smaller (fits right into the Pi and its case) and more convenient (no adapter). When one just got a Pi that might even be sold with a microSD then they’ll use that.
I’m not arguing it’s the right thing for data intense usage but the “why” IMHO is pretty obvious.
Come on, it’s a raspberry pi not an iphone. Those things are for tinkerers who live by “if it ain’t broke, fix it till it is”.
It’s for tinkerers yes but the RPi is popular because they try to facilitate the tinkering process. That means a lot of people will buy it in order to learn. That’s precisely why they sell the RPi400 and RPi with introductory books.
It’s not the same audience that’ll by a RPi5 without a case or compute modules.
If you’re using a SATA SSD then you don’t even need an enclosure, just a cable like this StarTech USB 3.1 one: https://a.co/d/0fBSMs7
The SSD is already in an enclosure (the case of the SSD), so placing it inside another enclosure is redundant…
NVMe SSDs aren’t worth getting for the Pi 4 because it doesn’t have a PCIe bus, so you’ll only be getting USB speeds anyways. A SATA SSD is fine for that. Still aorund 4x faster than using an SD card.
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I tried reading up on Nostr the other day, and came away finding it unpalatable, mainly because my understanding was that upvotes are tied to crypto.
The way I read it, you need some sort of crypto currency to pay for upvoting a post, from which I inferred that the only reasonable gauge for a posts popularity (upvotes) was intrinsically tied to money (and crypto-money, at that).
Is this a reasonable assessment, or did I misunderstand something?
EDIT: I was wrong, and stand corrected 👍
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Thank you for the clarification! I’ve clearly misunderstood the function of the crypto and/or read a poor description of Nostr 👌
In this case, the crypto (in itself still an unpalatable, energy wasting pyramid scheme, IMO) makes a lot more sense, and doesn’t detract from the platform (other than facilitating the platform’s tacit promotion of crypto).
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I myself am really an enthusiast of new tech. But the high energy use is a huge deal breaker IMHO.
Is that argument not true?
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Thank you! It’s going to be hard to change my mind on that one, but I’ll give it a go 😊👍
Your identity is not tied to your instance. If your instance closes up shop, you keep all your followers, followees, DMs, etc
This is one of the major advantages Bluesky’s protocol (AT Protocol) has over ActivityPub. ActivityPub doesn’t have anything built-in to support this. On Bluesky, you can use your own domain name as your username, and freely move from one server to another while keeping the same username (once they open up federation). It’s configured through a DNS TXT record.
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Can it federate with fediverse?
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I’m not sure if its true for Mastodon as well, but I read that self hosting a Lemmy instance was actually more work for the other servers to federate unless you had many users on your instance. Just something to keep in mind.
I’d run it with Docker. The official documentation looks sufficient to get it up and running. I’d add a database backup to the stack as well, and save those backups to a separate machine.
A Pi 4 draws maybe 5W of electricity most of the time. 24/7 operation at 5W will be your cost (approx 44 kWh per year), not including cost of the Pi, your internet connection, and any time you spend on maintenance.
I would not suggest mastodon for such low powered hardware, its also overkill for a personal instance. Akkoma or GotoSocial would work much better on a Pi. The annual cost is pretty much just 3-15$/year for the domain name.
Following along with interest.
Going for Yunohost on your Pi4 can make things easier, just follow the Yunohost documentation, and later you can ask help in the Yunohost forum if needed : https://yunohost.org/en/install/hardware:rpi34 Instead of Mastodon you can install sometimes more light weight and simple, like GoToSocial : https://apps.yunohost.org/catalog?category=social_media
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A raspberry pi isn’t fit for hosting public services. Your likely looking for a VPS.
Maybe not high traffic services, if it’s being self hosted the limiting factor is probably the upload bandwidth anyway. I’m not sure how resource intensive Mastodon is to host though.
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