Low-Cost Deployment of Federated Universe Personal Instances

I came across the concept of the Fediverse at the beginning of this year and found that it is the social network I have always envisioned: each instance is like an isolated island, connected through the network to communicate with each other.

To learn more about the Fediverse, you can read the blog posts from these individuals:

• Introduction to the Fediverse
• Fediverse: The Federated Universe
• What is the Fediverse and Can It Decentralize the Internet?
• What is Mastodon and How to Use It
• Fediverse Guide for Twitter Users

As a self-hosting enthusiast, I wanted to deploy my own instance. I asked about the cost of self-hosting on Mastodon and found that the minimum cost is $15/year for a server and domain name. In order to reduce costs, I didn't purchase a VPS and instead deployed my own instance on my Homelab. It has been running for half a year with a few issues (mainly due to my tinkering) such as internet or power outages at home. Since downtime results in lost messages, I decided to migrate to a server.

Among the popular software, Mastodon has more features but consumes more resources, so I chose Pleroma which consumes fewer resources but still meets my needs. I deployed it on various free services, achieving a server cost of $0 with only the domain name cost remaining. It has been running stable for a quarter.

Therefore, I would like to share this solution:

• Cloud platforms:

  1. Koyeb
  2. Northflank
  3. Zeabur (Originally free, but now only available through subscription plans (free plan is for testing only))

• Database:

  1. Aiven
  2. Neon

• Cloud storage:

  1. Cloudflare R2
  2. Backblaze B2

• CDN:

  1. Cloudflare

Deployment tutorial:

Remember, free things are often the most expensive. It is important to regularly back up the database and cloud storage.

Lastly, feel free to follow me on the Fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) at @chi@miantiao.me.