There's been some talk about Mastodon admins having scalability issues with the influx of new users the last couple of weeks. So I thought I'd share my experience running an instance-of-one for 4+ years.
When I started in 2018, I wanted to see how much of a headache it would be to maintain... And I'm happy to say it hasn't been a headache at all! Honestly, I'm surprised it's been so easy. Even with the recent increase in activity, I haven't noticed a hitch (hopefully I won't jinx it now xD).
I guess that's because I don't have that many following/followers (117/781). But that's probably most people's situation anyways.
I know, I know. Not everyone is going to host their own instance. But for someone who has some tech skills and is already hosting something like their personal website, this could be easier than they expect.
I've been running all my websites on a 10$ Digital Ocean droplet and it's been mostly hands-off.
The only thing I've had to do on a regular basis is running the following command: `tootctl media remove`. And it's so rarely that I haven't even bothered scheduling it (even renewing SSL certificates is more annoying).
I also migrated servers once, whilst keeping the same domain. And it was also easier than expected: https://noeldemartin.social/@noeldemartin/100788065871626613
If you're still worried about scalability, I've heard that pleroma.social scales even better for instances-of-one.
In any case, I hope this was useful to someone, and see you in the fediverse!