I am thinking about hosting my own Mastodon server from home on a Raspberry Pi (Pi4 8GB)?
Ajay Iyer@mastodon.social to 
I am thinking about hosting my own Mastodon server from home on a Raspberry Pi (Pi4 8GB)?
- Are there good tutorials out there?
- What's the annual cost just to host yourself?
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Don't know why people insist to run a RPi from a micro SD. Stick a proper SSD into an USB enclosure and be done with it.
Because it's cheaper (barely but still), smaller (fits right into the Pi and its case) and more convenient (no adapter). When one just got a Pi that might even be sold with a microSD then they'll use that.
I'm not arguing it's the right thing for data intense usage but the "why" IMHO is pretty obvious.
Come on, it's a raspberry pi not an iphone. Those things are for tinkerers who live by "if it ain't broke, fix it till it is".
It's for tinkerers yes but the RPi is popular because they try to facilitate the tinkering process. That means a lot of people will buy it in order to learn. That's precisely why they sell the RPi400 and RPi with introductory books.
It's not the same audience that'll by a RPi5 without a case or compute modules.
If you're using a SATA SSD then you don't even need an enclosure, just a cable like this StarTech USB 3.1 one: https://a.co/d/0fBSMs7
The SSD is already in an enclosure (the case of the SSD), so placing it inside another enclosure is redundant...
NVMe SSDs aren't worth getting for the Pi 4 because it doesn't have a PCIe bus, so you'll only be getting USB speeds anyways. A SATA SSD is fine for that. Still aorund 4x faster than using an SD card.