mastodon.ar.al is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
This is my personal fediverse server.

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Server stats:

1
active users

What happens when you have your own Mastodon instance (just for you) where over 21,000 people follow you and when you’re following over 4,300 people?

You end up paying ~€50/month for Mastodon hosting 👀

It also opens up interesting questions: what happens when a popular account joins your instance (hint: it will probably cost the instance maintainers quite a bit… I don’t envy the mastodon.nu folks right now).

This stuff is never free anywhere but the scale of Big Tech insulates you from it somewhat.

I actually think it’s good to be reminded that our ability to communicate comes with a cost – in terms of resources, environmental impact, etc., not just money.

But, equally, it also makes the case that a system optimised to host hundreds of thousands of people on a single instance is not also somehow magically optimised to host just one person.

The latter is the problem I’m exploring with .

@aral

> But, equally, it also makes the case that a system optimised to host hundreds of thousands of people on a single instance is not also somehow magically optimised to host just one person.

IDK; one of the major backends on the #Fediverse is #Pleroma and its cousins, which despite being more efficient (thus scaling better) than #Mastodon, it's largely used for single-instance users.
@aral on another note, how much would self hosting mitigate these costs?
Aral Balkan

@realcaseyrollins I’m assuming it would somewhat if you don’t count the cost of your time :)