[andrewzah]

I don't think the average router would be able to run much of anything, not to mention how insecure the average router is since people don't update them.

Mastodon is very resource heavy, I couldn't get it to run on a raspberry pi 3b. Pleroma is an alternative to mastodon that is very light on resources, I'd recommend that personally.

[singpolyma3]

I don't know that I'd call Pleroma "very light", but it's very light compared to Mastodon for sure.

[harlanji]

I can easily run Pleroma on 1G VPS and Pi3s; the heaviest part is the Postgres server, which can itself be tuned to be pretty light. It relies on PG's native JSON data type which is cool. I run a couple instances and poked around with it for a few hours. I'd love to see SQLite support in Pleroma given that it allegedly has JSON now; there is a 2 year old ticket on their GitLab [1] mentioning it tho I've not spiked in to see if it's 100% plausible to port. Pleroma is written with Elixir that has a DB abstraction library that supports SQLite, I was just looking into it this week.

Even if SQLite JSON isn't sufficient it could be realized with string columns for now, and indeed SQLite is recommended by Library of Congress for archival storage and used by iPhone so I think it's a solid way to expand Pleroma even if native JSON is not sufficient.

If anyone wants to pay me to do this as open source I'd jump, contact in bio. I don't know Elixir yet but am motivated and have 15+ years of dev experience in all kinds of systems, and experience in the adjacent parts.

1. https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma/-/issues/1333

[rglullis]

You can run Pleroma (with its database) on a raspberry pi with 1GB RAM. A single-user instance of Mastodon will require 8GB to run comfortably.

I think the main issue of Mastodon is that its search completely reliant on elasticsearch, while Pleroma tries to go by only with PostgreSQL FTS?

[wrycoder]

What could possibly take up 8 GB? It’s just some text display.

[rglullis]

It's a ruby application. Take all the background processes to build timelines, trending hashtags, etc and it adds up. Perhaps a single-user instance might do with less, but still...