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Stefano Marinelli

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe · 2 months ago

Self-hosting your Mastodon media with SeaweedFS

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/11/06/self-hosting-your-mastodon-media-with-seaweedfs/

#FreeBSD #SeaweedFS #Mastodon #ITNotes #Fediverse #Hosting #OwnYourData #RunBSD

IT Notes

Self-hosting your Mastodon media with SeaweedFS

A practical guide to boosting Mastodon performance by self-hosting your media with SeaweedFS. Configure a fast, S3-compatible storage backend to efficiently handle your instance's files and take full control of your data.

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Stefano Marinelli

Jason Tubnor 🇦🇺

@Tubsta@soc.feditime.com replied · last month

@stefano Any chance of a blog post with a similar configuration for Garage? Both articles would make a good reference point for people to bench their workloads on to determine to right platform to use for their use case.

Thanks for your great work @stefano Keep it up!

maswan

@maswan@mastodon.acc.sunet.se replied · 2 months ago

@stefano
For what scale do you think it is reasonable to break out media to its own service? I only have experience of up to a couple of hundred users with plain filesystem storage.

Stefano Marinelli

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied · 2 months ago

@maswan I'd do it immediately - even for one single user. But I'm a fan of keeping things separate (valkey on one jail, postgres on another, etc.)

maswan

@maswan@mastodon.acc.sunet.se replied · 2 months ago

@stefano Ah, I am not fond of running a lot of different services if I can get away without, from a maintenance burden point of view.

Stefano Marinelli

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied · 2 months ago

@maswan for me, it's the exact opposite: having all the services inside a single jail means that one dependency could break other stuff - while keeping them separate means I can upgrade, for example, valkey without having to upgrade, for example, ruby

linus

@linus@telegrafverket.cc replied · 2 months ago

@stefano interesting. do you have any idea how it compares to https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage ?

Stefano Marinelli

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied · 2 months ago

@linus I tested it. After more or less 60 GB, it started to be extremely slow and fill up all the CPUs. I decided to stop. I've been contacted by one of the devs and they suggested me to try a newer release. And I'll definitely do it as I love the concept.

jae[0]™

@jae@darkdork.dev replied · 2 months ago

@stefano @linus unfortunately even with latest build i still have slowdown with cpu-spiking at higher levels of storage. seaweedfs is also what i'm using i think i mentioned. works great especially given media endpoint. btw wonderful tutorial, wish i had it a few months ago lol

linus

@linus@telegrafverket.cc replied · 2 months ago

@stefano good to know, thanks for taking the time trying out different options 💪

Tom :damnified:

@thomas@metalhead.club replied · 2 months ago

@stefano thanks for your post! I've considered switching from Minio to SeaweedFS as well, but haven't really made a decision, yet. SeaweedFS seems to be very simple to set up. 💪

Kris

@kris@outmo.de replied · 2 months ago

@thomas @stefano I am happy with Garage for object storage. Definity worth a look 👍

Stefano Marinelli

@stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied · 2 months ago

@thomas I did it and it's been easier than expected. Now, SeaweedFS is my first choice for Mastodon Media hosting

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