If it's a personal server for yourself and maybe some friends and family, I would rather use GoToSocial, as it is much more lightweight and is less complex to set up and maintain.
I ran my own Mastodon for a while. While it does work, it takes up a ton of storage (every image and video you see is cached by your own server). It also doesn't work great for viewing stuff like replies and older posts, since backfilling is still not a thing. I ended up just browsing on remote servers instead.
A great blog post about this: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/
You can migrate away from them if you ever want to.
If you self host instead, make sure your server is on its own vlan. Servers are a target for exploitation, and you don’t want the rest of your home devices exposed if your server is compromised.
Note: A Pi probably has the CPU power, but the caching from the server may be more space than an SD card will hold.
Yeah, this is an important point tbh. Vlans alone don't add any security if your firewall doesn't do something to prevent it, as your router will happily forward packets to the next vlan. It should be on a DMZ vlan, meaning traffic is allowed in at the firewall but not to any other internal vlans.
Have you looked into nostr? It offers most of the same features of Mastodon except that:
Your identity is not tied to your instance. If your instance closes up shop, you keep all your followers, followees, DMs, etc
You can send encrypted DMs, so your instance admin can't read them
Cool tipping functionality so you can tip people if you like their posts. Or don't use it. It's optional.
Most nostr clients have some built-in filtering functionality to block out things that are NSFW, crypto-related, etc. Different relays have different moderation policies, much like mastodon instances.
Your identity is not tied to your instance. If your instance closes up shop, you keep all your followers, followees, DMs, etc
This is one of the major advantages Bluesky's protocol (AT Protocol) has over ActivityPub. ActivityPub doesn't have anything built-in to support this. On Bluesky, you can use your own domain name as your username, and freely move from one server to another while keeping the same username (once they open up federation). It's configured through a DNS TXT record.
No, but some functionality could be bolted onto it for that purpose. But it is a federated network, just within it's own protocol. Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc) run on an underlying protocol: ActivityPub, so they can all federate with each other within ActivityPub.
Nostr runs on an underlying protocol also confusingly called nostr. Nostr's main "interface" is a twitter clone, but the underlying protocol supports things like video streaming sites etc and some interfaces have been built for that purpose.
I'm not sure if its true for Mastodon as well, but I read that self hosting a Lemmy instance was actually more work for the other servers to federate unless you had many users on your instance. Just something to keep in mind.
I would not suggest mastodon for such low powered hardware, its also overkill for a personal instance. Akkoma or GotoSocial would work much better on a Pi. The annual cost is pretty much just 3-15$/year for the domain name.
Not that I know of, but most likely. If you're new to hosting, maybe look for automated tools that does the heavy lifting for you - Like how Lemmy can be installed by copying and pasting a single command.
Beyond power/internet, you can host for free. Subdomains can be free, I assume you have the hardware and pay for power and internet anyways.
Maybe not high traffic services, if it's being self hosted the limiting factor is probably the upload bandwidth anyway. I'm not sure how resource intensive Mastodon is to host though.
I have a Pi4 running a mastodon branch, the "dreaded capacity hog" synapse and much more. Never had any issues with capacity. I know people who set up Pi's as CDN relief servers for PeerTube video transfers.