Hosting Hachyderm

Ship It! Cloud, SRE, Platform Engineering

Preston Doster joins the show to tell us what it takes to run a Mastodon server with 55,000 accounts and 11,000 monthly active users.

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Sponsors:

• Sentry – Code breaks, fix it faster. Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 off the team plan. Don’t just observe. Take action. Sentry is the only app monitoring platform built for developers that gets to the root cause for every issue. 100,000+ growing teams use sentry to find problems fast.
• System Initiative – The future of DevOps automation (is here!) — System Initiative is an intuitive, powerful, collaborative replacement for Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The free tier is awesome (no credit card required) and you can get started in 3 clicks.
• Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai.

Featuring:

• Preston Doster – Mastodon, GitHub
• Justin Garrison – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Autumn Nash – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

Interview

• Hachyderm
• Public grafana dashboard

One correction about the cost to run Hachyderm. Preston said it’s about $600/mo and after the interview emailed me to let me know it’s closer to $1000/mo

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Capitoli

1. This is Ship It! (00:00:00)

2. Sponsor: Sentry (00:00:52)

https://sentry.io/

3. Scaling decentralized things (00:03:12)

4. What are Webrings? (00:04:10)

5. How Justin met his wife (00:04:32)

6. What does Toolio do? (00:07:56)

7. Start of Hachyderm (00:10:10)

8. Traditional scaling (00:12:47)

9. Extra stress (00:15:14)

10. When did you need a CDN? (00:19:16)

11. Where does funding come frome? (00:20:16)

12. Nivenly's other projects (00:20:55)

13. Nivenly spending & Hachyderm cost (00:21:47)

14. Sponsor: System Initiative (00:24:20)

https://www.systeminit.com/?utm_source=changelog

15. The Hachyderm team (00:27:59)

16. Redis licensing (00:29:21)

17. Manual deployment (00:29:50)

18. Who gets paged? (00:31:47)

19. How many active users? (00:34:08)

20. Next fallover (00:34:33)

21. Most painful part of infrastructure (00:37:32)

22. Data residency (00:39:44)

23. Why Germany? (00:43:22)

24. Why are DMCAs an issue? (00:44:39)

25. The intent (00:45:38)

26. Sponsor: Timescale (00:46:12)

https://www.timescale.com

27. Blocking other servers? (00:48:33)

28. Mastodon server blacklist? (00:50:54)

29. Performance costs of Threads (00:52:41)

30. Threads metadata (00:55:29)

31. Individual blocklist & migrations (00:59:10)

32. Figuring out archiving (01:04:42)

33. Long term risks (01:05:47)

34. Always looking for volunteers (01:06:18)

35. Thanks for joining us! (01:08:10)

36. Outro (01:09:20)