I pay several times more running a Mastodon instance than I would for twitter blue. AMA
@mauve how much has the (emotional etc) cost in moderation been?
@DragonDave Negligible since I'm pretty much a single user instance and don't follow many folks that federate with trolls. Been thinking of opening it up a bit more but I think that'll require setting aside more time to write up a policy and make time for following up on any moderation requests.
How does the cost lay out? I'd like to think about how to support my instance properly.
@swordplay Right now I'm paying $12 a month for a 2GB droplet on Digital Ocean with 1 CPU and 50 GB of storage. On top of that I also pay $10 a month for 100GB of storage. This is pretty cheap and works since it's mostly me. In my experience storage has been a bit of a pain, so setting up servers to use cheaper volume storage right from the get go is a good idea.
I'd ask your admins how much their costs are. I assume time spent moderating would be the biggest cost TBH.
@swordplay Oh! Also until I did the volume thing I was paying like 40 dollars a month for a beefier droplet since I needed to keep expanding the SSD to fit more posts.
So you only have yourself?
@swordplay Pretty much at the moment. I have some friends that registered but I'm the only one active atm.
@mauve Let's look at it another way: you pay infinitely less to run your own microblogging instance than Elon did when he purchased Twitter.
Mauve 1 ; Elon 0