Conversation

Instance admins: I'm considering building a media pool/admin alliance I'm tentatively calling "Jortage" (jean storage) because, why not. (Also the domain is available.)

I'd be willing to do initial setup and handle accounts, as well as write scripts to ease migration; the idea is we'd all pay for the server together, based on ability to pay, to the point of poorer instance admins getting to use it for free.

The approximate cost of a server with sufficient disk to self-host a future-proof shared media server and handle initial imports is $200/mo; I'm currently looking at a server with OVH in eastern Canada offering 8TB on RAID6/RAID10 with guaranteed gigabit symmetric, but am open to other suggestions. Other hosts I know of are on ColoCrossing or are far too expensive.

This would offer a viable alternative to Wasabi, S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, Azure Storage, Google Cloud Storage, et al for instance admins, with hopefully better uptime compared to Wasabi, and without being affiliated with Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. Mastodon additionally duplicates remote media, which costs everyone extra on these platforms, but on here it'd get deduplicated and be a non-issue.

If you're an instance admin and are interested, please reply to this post saying so and mention approximately how many US$ per month you could comfortably contribute ($0 is a valid answer). Also mention if you'd be willing to help with administrating the server. If you're not an instance admin, also feel free to mention how much you could contribute, if you want. I'm considering OpenCollective for managing collecting money and transparently paying server bills, but am obviously open to other suggestions.