I’m looking for a customizable, resource-efficient Mastodon fork. Bonfire? Rebased? Or go non-Ruby, like Pleroma (nah), Misskey Calckey, indeed, Lemmy (hui)? Any experiences?
This is part of an endeavour to host w/ a RaspberryPi & solar power. It will be a device to mess around, test, and share experiences.
Potential features:
- tweaking network traffic in various ways
- media options: off, auto compression, auto delete
- monitoring server metrics, energy flow, sharing data through a bot
- auto-off when battery low, sad emoji
Re-posting this from Mastodon w/ minor edits, because Fediverse and potential cross-interaction. I probably should have posted here first and then shared the link on Mastodon, but it’s a Mastodon question, so I did it the other way around. Still not sure what’s the best way to do this though.
I think you’d have a much better time with something lighter than Mastodon if it’s running on a limited system. If you are really looking to minimise requirements, Pleroma and its derivatives are unfortunately about the best for it afaik, though I certainly have plenty of misgivings. I’m personally partial to GoToSocial, and it’d be my go-to recommendation for any self-host atm unless they had specific requirements that made it unsuitable.
Thanks, this is the way to go. Since my project is for research and testing purposes, however, I might check out multiple setups and compare results. A follow-up post sounds about right.
I need a bit of spare time to start working on that soon-ish.
it’s still in alpha, but if it’s just for messing around maybe try GoToSocial!
I never used mastodon because my servers would never handle it. I started with Friendica, moved to pleroma, and ended up ultimately with rebased (and obviously lemmy and lotide and peertube)
I find it really funny seeing people on mastodon whining about certain features being unavailable when they’re available to many projects on the fediverse.
Excellent, thanks for sharing your journey. Some servers could “never handle it” because of all the caching and redundancies?
Slowly I am becoming aware of the limitations of Mastodon, which are also closely related to the managament, it seems, shy of listening to the people. Rebased sounds like my favourite so far, although GoToSocial, as mentioned by @[email protected] (and folks on Masto) is also worth exploring.
My first server had an outdated CPU, very little memory and a spinning hard drive, so that turned out to be a huge limitation for a lot of software. I needed stuff that hardly used any memory and also didn’t have a lot of extra services running at once. When I started adding some services, lots of stuff started grinding to a halt.
On linux, the glances application is really useful. Besides just showing you what programs are using memory and CPU time, it also shows IOWait times and throughput so if you’re being bottlenecked by something or other it’s a lot easier to see.
There’s also a service called tuned that does some automatic tuning, and if you’re using postgres databases, there’s another tool called pg_repack that’ll pack your database while running. It maxes out your CPU and uses a lot of disk while running, but if you don’t do something routinely then your postgresql database slowly gets sloppier and it’ll start using more and more resources until your server appears to be useless.
I quite like the Akkoma fork of Pleroma.
If you only want a single-user instance you can go with honk.
Right now I host it on my rpi3 under a vlan connection (1000kbps/125kbps). No struggle, 120mb in ram for an uptime of 80 days. Following nearly 40 accounts on 15 instances.
Wow, this is a bonkers project, love it!
The dev also works on a lemmy-reddit like.
It is at an extreme early stage but if you like honk you could like it too.
