I run a self-hosted instance for a bunch of friends. It's on a VM on a 10-year old homebuilt TrueNAS server. For added entertainment, I installed it manually o

I run a self-hosted instance for a bunch of friends. It's on a VM on a 10-year old homebuilt TrueNAS server. For added entertainment, I installed it manually on FreeBSD, because I like playing old-school 'I do things by hand' sysadmin at home. It's connected to the world through a free Cloudflare tunnel. I have a residential fiber connection. It doesn't use S3, it just dumps files to the filesystem. I did clamp down on federation settings, and it purges old content aggressively so federated content doesn't make the hard drives metaphorically explode. One user following someone on mastodon.social and you can see storage usage climb by gigs a day with defaults. After the initial setup it's been honestly quite painless. It just works. If people start relying on it, I'll probably move it to masto.host.