7 Minute Miles

The Mastodon Tech Stack


The last three weeks of using Mastodon on Ivory for iOS have been lovely. Today I was able to join the preview of the macOS version and it is also lovely. The scale of everything is smaller than Twitter, but I’m so excited about the future of this project. I’m planning to write a short series of posts here, starting with the tech stack of running a Mastodon server instance, then moving on to finance, marketing, legal and operations.

From my early research, there are many different ways to roll out and optimize a Mastodon server, but there are some core open source technologies common to everything I’ve read:

Also required: an SMTP email server and file storage. Looking at this from my AWS viewpoint, I’d probably use a Linux instance with nginx, Let’s Encrypt, Route 53, Simple Email Service (SES) and Simple Storage Service (S3). Seeing several references to Docker or Kubernetes too, but I don’t know much about how those container technologies really work (yet).

Cloudflare has their new Wildebeest offering and I’m sure there will be more “click and go” options from all of the usual suspects as well. It would be fun to create a small instance as a proof of concept, but I’d also want a design that could scale up without having to rebuild from scratch. Cost management, backup/recovery, load balancing and security are also important factors.

More to come…

Originally published by DK on February 15, 2023 at 5:09 pm in Mastodon, Technology


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