[maxsilver]

> I would like to understand why Mastodon requires such a huge amount of hardware for mediocre traffic volumes.

There's some inherent overhead in a federated model (vs a single-source one), and the ActivityPub protocol Mastodon happens to use, wasn't necessarily designed to be the lightest possible thing in all use-cases.

Also, there's just a lot more traffic. My instance said, after Twitter's major struggles, they saw something like 30x more traffic and 20x more daily registrations. For instances that, prior to the influx, were running by volunteers in spare time out of people's bedrooms or small cheap VPS's and such.

These instances weren't necessarily ideally performance-tuned prior to the influx (and even if yours was, the remote ones your users might need to hit to fetch content from may not have been)