this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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$5000 a month sounds a lot for forwarding text messages and images. According to the Fediverse Observer they have 12,000 active users (boils down to $5 per user a year), but still... Is it that much storage or computationally so expensive to federate posts?
I've always been surprised by cost numbers mentioned in services and donation requests.
I run my own cheap server which has game servers running in the past, and some other services. I've not run any busy services though or fediverse content so I never felt like I could make a reasonable assessment. Just be surprised.
Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud... for myself and family if they want. And that's $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn't scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).
Same. My entire setup costs less than 5$ a month mostly in energy.
I used to run such things on my NAS/Server at home (And I still do, though I'm currently changing some things.) But in addition to the 4.50€ for ~20W of electricity, it was maybe 600€ for the machine, so another 5€ a month over 10 years. And then my internet contract is a bit more expensive because I need an IPv4 address which can do port forwarding... On the flipside, I can just attach a 10TB harddrive and have it available everywhere. And that'd be very expensive with a cloud service or hoster.
Sounds like a good setup. I have the equivalent of a raspberry pi haha.
Energy is extremely expensive where I'm at.