ok here it is. how to set up your very own single-user mastodon instance and run it free forever. boosts ok in case it's useful to anyone who wants to set one up. i recommend doing it simply for fun and for the learning experience. good luck! https://josh.is-cool.dev/running-a-mastodon-instance-entirely-free-forever/
For those who are in need of a more detailed walkthrough of setting up your #Mastodon instance on #OracleCloudInfrastructure I also wrote a step-by-step guide over a year ago.
@josh Nice post. One overarching thought came to mind while reading it:
As an OCI-based instance person (and prior user of many Oracle products), the only thing to keep in mind is that Oracle has a history of changing terms at will and the ramifications there of. To avoid them occasionally reclaiming your instance/space/etc (which others have noted, and I've seen as well), it was suggested to me to migrate to a paid level even if your bill is $0 each month. I haven't had any incidents since September when I did that.
Last, given the above two notes, a section on how to do backups routinely would be helpful for folks so if OCI reclaims or otherwise trashes your stuff, you can recover somewhat easily. (I backup my postgres DB and config files and then stash those outside of OCI).
Definetely going to try that Mastodon server @josh
Already have a free Oracle cloud site running http://bythelake.nz so shouldn't be to hard to do.
When I saw your blog, I noticed it was a Zola site. Same as mine.
Interesting !
Having a go now myself with the Terminimal theme.
Your theme is a lot easier to use then the one I had selected. So giving that a go !!
Your and my site surprisingly similar. Suppose because they're both Zola based....
Cheers 🙂🙂
@sashin it's to get you on their ecosystem, then when you want to upgrade your services you're more likely to pay them money. I haven't paid them anything yet :)
@josh I've being running my instance for about a month now. Had to give my credit card to Oracle because the free ARM servers are pretty much impossible to snag these days! But as long as I keep to the free tier resources it doesn't cost me a thing.
@JetForMe they are definitely there. When you go to create a compute instance you should be able to change it's "shape" and you'll be able to choose the Ampere instances there
@josh nice write up :) I’m on essentially a single user instance too - any advice on managing the clunky bits of actually using it, like replies not showing up due to not much federation etc etc?
@joel hmm i don't think i've experienced replies not showing up before, but maybe i just haven't noticed. yeah i guess that's just the way it goes. you can try using relays, but in my experience it clogs up your server quite a bit.
@josh Do you see any issues with the cleanup commands you use? I've been playing around with the 'media remove --prune-profiles' command myself, but I find that anything below 7 days results in quite a few missing avatars and headers when browsing the feed.
@josh Any advice on how to keep oom kill events down with only 2GB? I've been experimenting with limiting memory for redis and postgres and pulling sidekiq workers down so the runners are limited too. Would be interested in anything specific you did.
@vees I was running my current instance on a 1GB server and just put a few GB of swap memory on there and it did OK except it was a little slow obviously, no kill events that I could tell. When I moved to 12GB RAM obviously no more issues. Good luck with yours. Seems promising.
@josh I have a 2GB VM and 2GB of swap, which eliminated my OOM, but it is shitty for my IO PSI especially since its just a stand-in for additional DB fetches anyway. I'm hoping to just make my sidekiq queues a little longer and redis to keep a little less in memory and see where it takes me.
@josh I don't want to be that guy, but TLD is the top level, so .social is a TLD and .com, .net etc. are. mastodon.social is a doman name. something.mastodon.social is a subdomain.
TLD are very expensive, so when I saw "free TLD" I jumped over there! 😀 Great article, though.
@randulo I guess I meant, get a domain on a TLD and didn't realise I was referring to the wrong thing. Anyway I just removed all references to TLDs :) Thanks!
I am pretty much in the same spot now, on Oracle Cloud Free, with clean-up cron jobs set up when I ran out of space the first time.
I have added crowdsec and Caddy as well
I don't recall having had to provide a credit card for free sendgrid - maybe it has changed since I signed up - but it does the mail job nicely in case of needing account recovery.
@jpm@josh I am very content with my current level of computer touching which is best described as “knowing what stuff is, but having absolutely no idea how to use it and no real motivation to ever want to know”
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