I am looking to host a **de-federated** mastodon instance for 300 to 500 people.

I am looking to host a **de-federated** mastodon instance for 300 to 500 people.

I wanted to know what kind server specs I should go for for this kind of project. should I go for 8gb or 4gb of RAM, roughly how many vCPUs/threads, etc..

#fediverse #mastodon #SelfHosting #activitypub #homelab

@spacebuffer@fosstodon.org You are gonna want the higher specs of 8GB min, Especially if those 300-500 people are going to be often login in.

What's your use case of a de-federated Mastodon Instance? Would it not be better to just federate to specific instances (Not sure if you can do that on Mastodon but I know you can on Sharkey and that uses less resources)

@sam

thanks for the info!
Its for internal news at a multi-regional company.

@spacebuffer 8gb and 4+ cpu + object storage/ s3

@sam@break3.social @spacebuffer@fosstodon.org 8GB?! Those are insane system requirements for what is basically text and media exchange.

An intra-org forum for 800 running NodeBB would be 2GB max, 1 CPU, and you'd really only see 100 actively using the site, if that.

Mastodon is a beast eh.

@julian @sam

Indeed I also felt this was a bit much but then ago mastodon's focus doesn't seem to be on being lightweight.

NodeBB seems very interesting, probably not for this project but maybe for other things, does it support federation?

@spacebuffer@fosstodon.org NodeBB is meant to be supported Federation, I haven't seen much from them along with the extent of there Federation for Forms based most people end up using Lemmy or Piefed, but Mbin is a good mix between the two.

From my experience Mastodon can be pretty heavy, I've ended up moving to Sharkey for a few reasons, Lightweight-ness being one, the other benefits are stuff like the multiple names for custom emojis, S3 Support, A Private Chat system for Instance wide chatting and Custom Emoji reactions.

Obviously I'm not sure of your use-case, especially looking to not federate the instance is a strange choice.

@spacebuffer If you want to host an instance for a group of acquaintances and perhaps federate it with only some instances and not others, you can use Friendica.
Friendica also allows you to create public and private groups, but most importantly, it allows users to set up different circles for posting (friends, relatives, bowling group, birdwatching group, etc.).

@spacebuffer@fosstodon.org yes! It fully supports two-way federation and interacts well with Mastodon and Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin.

There are granular visibility controls so you can have some categories federating and some not.

There's also a feed view if you really can't give up the feed

cc @sam@break3.social