ResPublicae.eu admin @praetor@respublicae.eu

#ResPublicae accounts now have over 70,000 followers (not unique).

Under the hood, Mastodon keeps track of many more users who for some reason interacted with our instance. Over time that becomes rather wasteful, so we've finally activated regular data purging. Such #MastoAdmin hygiene saves us 200 GB in storage.

Even better, we no longer have to worry about holding potentially personal data about thousands of users for no reason. Our #privacy policy now looks better.
https://respublicae.eu/terms

It's easy to tell the server was a bit busier.

Due to the growth of the #fediverse, which may have passed 10 million registered users depending how you count, we had to update our #DigitalServicesAct (#DSA) disclosures.
https://respublicae.eu/about/more

More #MastoAdmin trivia/transparency for #ResPublicae.

The main operating cost for this instance is arguably RAM. 4 GB is more than enough, but it's nice to have some buffer. A DB crashing for lack of memory is not fun.

CPU usage varies a lot (but predictably) with traffic. We're on cheap shared CPUs, and 40 % steal CPU at the peak doesn't sound great, but the min idle CPU is over 10 %, so we never really run out of CPU due to bad neighbours. #Scaleway seems to be good enough at scheduling.

Follow links to the sources through Nitter to verify posts.

Due to unexpected output in Twitter's v1 API, some quote tweets have been posted on #ResPublicae as if they were authored by the quoted user.

The issue is now handled by our mirror sofware #PleromaBot thanks to swift action by the developer. It lasted perhaps a few hours while a new version was being tested.

The cases we noticed were deleted manually.

We apologise for the confusion.

Update: the object storage grew to some 500 GB but the costs are still around 25 €/month. CPU and memory are still quite overprovisioned.

For transparency and in case it helps people considering whether to self-host a similar #Mastodon instance, the operating costs of #ResPublicae are currently a little less than 25 €/month (VAT included).

Without any performance optimisation whatsoever, the instance is currently quite overprovisioned and should have enough capacity to withstand over 1 year of growth.

Using a smaller instance would cut hosting costs by some 10 €/month, but reducing #MastoAdmin time costs is more important.