I set up a Mastodon instance today on a tiny linode instance with 1GB of RAM ($5/mo). The things that were most annoying:
- Node by default won't use more than half of your RAM for heap, even if you have a large swapfile. I had to override this with NODE_OPTIONS=--max_old_space_size=4096 . (It needed about 1.5GB overall, I think.)
- Setting up mail services on the internet sucks.
Thanks to @Raspberry_Pi for the great step-by-step. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/host-your-own-mastodon-instance-on-a-raspberry-pi/
@crschmidt @Raspberry_Pi@raspberrypi.social Well, DKIM seesm to help a lot, but a bad-reputation ISP's IPv4 address will prevent your mail from making it, that's true. (OTOH, if you're used to self-host, you already know your ways around this anyway. This, honestly, only hits those new to »fediversal things«, IMO.)
Much more annoying to me is the ›insane‹ amount of disksspace Mastodon is consuming, even for a sole user:
12G /home/mastodon/
9.7G /home/mastodon/live/public/
That's after a purge a few days ago …
@wusel This is largely because I just haven't set up anything new I'm hosting myself for a long time, either, but all of the emails from my wordpress instance have gone to spam since like, 2012 and I deal with it by just "designing my life such that I don't need the emails from my wordpress instance" :)
Like, I have explicitly set up software I have written to not send out email confirmations for signups specifically because sending email sucks!
@crschmidt I've set up SPF back then when it came out, but ignored DKIM and friends because, well, they all came with their own issues. As a result, getting my emails into my G-inbox was hit-and-miss. After revamping my 10+ year old mail setup, going TLS 1.2+ and adding DIKIM , I haven't found an email of mine in my Gmail's spam folder — even though I'm sending from a "green" IP now. But yes, email feels more and more non-deterministic these days, it's a shame :(
@crschmidt Doing this as a hobby for associations and myself, I'd say it's really not THAT hard, IF your ISP's IPv4 isn't burnt by previous usage.
If it is (check e. g. https://mxtoolbox.com) —save your time and switch ISPs.
Except t-online.de (Deutsche Telekom), who works on a weird and unique block-all-unless-manually-whitelisted policy, having your DNS in order, maybe use SPF (doesn't hurt) and surely use DKIM, I do get my testmails through to my accounts with G, MS, Yahoo, etc.
@wusel I haven't self-hosted anything that sends email correctly for a decade. I did some playing with exim4, but in the end I just swapped to using the free tier of sendgrid (100 emails/day is hopefully going to be enough).