Very interesting article! I have immense respect for jerry@infosec.exchange, he was one of the first people I found on the fediverse, and it's no wonder why, he's revered quite highly by others as being a generous and kind admin.

I do want to point out one thing, and that is that Mastodon has some design decisions that make it rather resource and storage intensive.

There are oodles of lighter software out there, some with even more features than Mastodon, and some with less. For example, snac.bsd.cafe (https://snac.bsd.cafe/) runs on Snac, which is fast as hell.

I am going to guess that a not insignificant portion of Jerry's bill is caching assets. Mastodon likes to save everything it encounters, videos, images, avatars, everything... forever (though I imagine this is customisable). Most likely the assets are viewed a handful of times in one day and never seen again... but you'll pay to store it forever!

[–] andypiper@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago

One of the ways that this could improve in the future is that we're working on a notional caching service as a future Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider, so that this kind of content could be shared between small groups of instances that chose to use it.

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