Mastodon requires a server (physical or virtual), and it’s also highly recommended to use an S3 bucket to store all local/remote media. It also requires a lot of time, resources and mental energy.

Any cloud provider should be fine. Try to find something local to your region. I’m in Sydney, so I’m using Linode, and Wasabi because they have Sydney based data centers, and offer good prices.

Mastodon is built around multiple pieces of technology, and each of them can be tweaked to improve performance.

Key themes of this document is to highlight bottle necks and allow for scaling. All of these services can be run from a single box, but we HIGHLY recommend splitting them up as you start to scale (as soon as you can afford it).

Firstly, Please read the blogs written by Gargon and the official documentation on scaling. We will be using these for future reference.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2017/04/scaling-mastodon/
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/
https://gist.github.com/Gargron/aa9341a49dc91d5a721019d9e0c9fd11

A stable and high user Mastodon instance is made up of multiple pieces which are all working together.

• Patreon (or similar) to cover operating costs.
• DNS for internet facing resources.
• Email provider to send signups/password resets and other notifications.
• Cloud Storage (S3 compatable) to store and serve media (images/videos/avatars/etc).
• CDN to store and server static resources (js/css/svg/etc).
• VMs to host the Web servers (Frontend/API/Streaming/etc)
• VMs to host the Sidekiq Queue worker processes.
• VMs to host the Databases (Postgres) and Cache (Redis).
• Additional VMs might be required for monitoring/metrics and reporting.

Each of these pieces can be tuned, and optimised for cost/performance. I will make recommendations for all of these.

High Level diagram of Aus.Social (NOV 2022)

Generic diagram of a Mastodon Instance