This is not a complete write-up (far from it), but since a few people have asked, here are some barebones details of my Mastodon server.

(Note: I am utterly unconvinced that self-hosting is the right answer for most people, or is the answer to online privacy or other problems.)

Hardware

Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB, with the PoE+ HAT.

Network

It is on its own VLAN.

My Raspberry Pis are in cheap-ish racks.

They are powered via PoE, fed from a couple of UniFi switches.

In case anyone cares, here’s what my network traffic graph has looked like for the last day, for a single-user instance of Mastodon, with one not terribly popular user (me!).

It shows an average network throughput of roughly 1Mbit from midnight until 19:00, after which it rises to about 10Mbit. There is a peak of 100Mbit at 01:00, which is probably a backup rather than mastodon traffic.

It looked a lot less than this a couple of weeks ago!

Operating system

My “usual” build of Raspberry Pi OS.

It is the standard Raspberry Pi OS (so, Debian), which I have tweaked so:

• it has LUKS full disk encryption, with dropbear-ssh for remote unlocking of the disk pre-boot (howto).

• it has some standard security mechanisms applied. Locked-down SSH, ufw for firewalling, vulnerability scanning (via greenbone), on-device scanning, and so on.

Here’s a snapshot of CPU and RAM usage:

%Cpu(s): 21.9 us,  6.7 sy,  0.0 ni,  0.0 id, 70.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  1.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :   3795.0 total,    168.7 free,   2493.4 used,   1132.9 buff/cache

And usage is predominantly Mastodon-related:

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                           
 529531 mastodon  20   0 3393116 959352   9804 S  77.8  24.7   3622:22 bundle                            
 965302 redis     20   0  131140  54160   1540 R  31.5   1.4   2512:16 redis-server 

Software

I use the source-based installation of Mastodon.

In front of it is nginx, as a reverse-proxy. nginx handles TLS, proxying traffic to the mastodon instance.

cronjobs

I’ve a couple of cronjobs.

One backs the system up automatically to a remote system.

The other runs the tootctl media remove command, to wipe all but the last seven days of media.

These each run daily.

Sign-ups

I am the only user of the server. I have an account for me (mastodon.neilzone.co.uk/@neil, and an account for my business, decoded.legal, but I don’t use that.

I have zero interest in opening the server up to others, as that brings hassles and complexity that I just don’t want!

I use the option for MFA via hardware security keys.

Clients

On my Android phone, I use Twidere. It also lets me cross-post with Twitter.

On my computer(s), I just use the Mastodon web interface, in Advanced mode. If the superb Twitter client cawbird one day supports the fediverse, then I might use that instead.

I occasionally use an iPad (my hunt for a Linux tablet is one for another day), and on that I use Tootle.