Unsolicited opinion: If #Mastodon wants to be a part of the #Fediverse that encourages small #selfhosted instances to be part of the whole, then it has to be a lean system able to be installed on second-hand/hand-me-down hardware and it should run reasonably well.
ElasticSearch/Java is a barrier to that. It is a huge memory hog compared to the rest of the system.
#footiMac #Debian
This was definitely a factor in why I went with pyfedi instead of mbin. (Nothing wrong with mbin for those who can handle the higher resource requirements, but pyfedi is leaner.)
IRC, or XMPP at worst, should be the gold standard to follow here. Those things can be installed on Pentium IVs that you can get from rural school trash yards, and still run reasonably well.
Elasticsearch is optional. It’s great for public servers but probably of little value for self-hosted instances.
