Heavy Networking 670: The Challenges And Satisfactions Of Building And Running A Mastodon Instance

Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform. It relies on a federation model that connects disparate servers, or instances in Mastodon parlance, that are stood up and operated by…anyone! Yes, anyone can download Mastodon’s open-source software, set up a site, and start hosting users. Instance owners can set their own policies around users and content, and also get to decide which other instances to federate with. If you’re thinking, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of work to use Mastodon,” you don’t have to run your own instance–you can join any number of pre-existing ones. For example, I have an account on Mastodon.social, and I’m able to interact with people across a variety of instances. But some people are willing to take the plunge of basically operating a mini-social network. On today’s Heavy Networking I talk with two people who have built and are running Hachyderm. Hachyderm is a Mastodon instance which orients itself towards technical-minded folks. At last check of their publicly available dashboard, they’re supporting more than 45,000 users and are peered with over 21,000 other instances. My guests are Kris Nova, a software engineer and Principal at GitHub, as well as Hachyderm’s Benevolent Dictator for Life; and Dominic Hamon, Sr. Engineer Manager at Google and Hachyderm’s Monitoring Maven. We discuss: * Why they started their own instance instead of joining one * Their initial hardware and software setup * Moving out of the basement and into a hosting facility * Dealing with unexpected and rapid growth * How they handled operations and troubleshooting * Saving the day with observability * The challenges of scaling people and processes * More Sponsor: InterOptic Fortune 500 companies choose InterOptic optical transceivers to minimize the risk of network failures and maximize IT savings. InterOptic’s transceivers are 100% guaranteed compatible with Cisco, Juniper, Extreme, Arista and others, and available at a fraction of the cost. Work with the optics experts at InterOptic! Go to interoptic.com/packet-pushers/ to find out more. Show Links: Hachyderm.io Become a sponsor to Hachyderm – GitHub Nivenly Foundation Leaving the Basement – Hachyderm Community Hachyderm Public Dashboards Kris Nova on Hachyderm Kris Nova on GitHub Dominic Hamon on Hachyderm Dominic Hamon on LinkedIn