So uh, apparently $288/year is not enough to run a Mastodon service for ~3 users, and this is a known issue (https://masto.host/mastodon-content-retention-settings/) with no solution (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/19260)?!

I just want to own my identity. On Bluesky, it takes a TXT record and a did:plc rotation key. A PDS takes like $25/yr. For $300/yr you can run a whole-network relay.

Also, it's unclear if I can move to non-Mastodon software without losing all my posts, despite owning the domain??

And this ecosystem sneers at atproto?

@filippo Pleroma/Akkoma are more lightweight if that helps

@buherator I can migrate to Pleroma/Akkoma without losing my posts?

@filippo Last time I checked you couldn't even migrate post between instances running the same software... I'm not sure if this is only a limitation when you'd transfer posts between remote servers and you could just vibe code a DB migration script, or there's some fundamental limitation of how posts are referenced in the network.

@filippo welcome to the world on inefficient Ruby-on-Rails apps that overgrow their scope, Sidekiq jobs that flush like they need to scrape the whole Internet, abuse of Redis caching and Postgres databases treated like dumpyards 🙂

I gave up self-hosting Mastodon a few years ago for these very reasons (among others related to their development processes).

I’ve been hosting Akkoma since then and I’m overall very happy. It supports things that Mastodon never implemented too (custom maximum number of characters and profile fields, Markdown and BBcode, custom emoji reactions…). It’s just probably not for the faint of heart, the configuration is a big Elixir script file (and the project itself is written in Elixir), the documentation is not always polished and it may require you to get your hands a bit dirty. But on an instance like mine with a lot of peers it still doesn’t eat up more than 1-2 GB of RAM, and CPU and storage are under control.

For a self-hosting single-user solution with lower entry barriers, GoToSocial is another popular option (but it may not be as feature-rich as Pleroma/Akkoma).

And if you want to stick more to the blogging format, WriteFreely and Madblog are popular option (but of course I may be a bit biased here, being both projects I’ve either contributed to or kickstarted).

Just one little thing to keep in mind: if you have a lot of followers, you follow a lot of people or you joined some high-traffic relays, your storage may also degrade over time. Your db may permanently store a lot of activities and events that you may not even ever see. It’s usually a good practice to schedule object prune/compaction crons on your instance regardless of the software you use.

@filippo p.s. unfortunately you can’t migrate your posts. That’s something that has never been implemented on ActivityPub (and it’s an implementation nightmare too because created objects are permanent and you can’t modify their author).

But you can migrate your account and your followers. This has been implemented in a quite solid way through the movedTo notifications, and usually most of the servers know how to process them.

You can also reuse the same domain and handle (I did so recently when migrating my blog from Writefreely to Madblog), but just pay a bit of attention and look out for federation issues. Keep a copy of your current instance’s private key, and if possible reuse the same key also on the new instance.