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2025-02-19T03:31:43Z
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Mitra: An ideal fedi software for single-user instancesA while back I ran a Pleroma instance on some lowendbox VPS as my main instance, which I then migrated to Soapbox/Rebased. Eventually; something bad happened: The classic “Pleroma DB bloat” issue reared its ugly head and then my VPS provider went out of business. So I just ditched the instance and forgot about it. In 2024, I tried to host wafrn as I thought it’d be cool to host something Tumblr like and I had gotten reposts from them on a less blocked instance, only to find out that the software was really not designed to be self-hosted and was mostly written for the namesake Tumblr clone.Recently some of my fedi mutuals had been talking about this new piece of fedi software called Mitra. Mitra is a brand-new piece of fedi software, written in Rust and designed to be lightweight. With a low CPU and memory footprint, it’s ideal to run on cheap VPSes from LowEndBox or that Core 2 Duo Dell Optiplex lying under your bed. It even does media proxying out of the box!What makes Mitra notable is two things: it’s very lightweight and if you use a Debian-based distro it’s very easy to install. By that I mean, Debian/Ubuntu with systemd (I have no idea how it works on Devuan as it uses a systemctl script). Even better; the setup is very easy. If installing Pleroma takes a while, requires you to make secret keys, and whatnot, installing Mitra simply requires you to wget a deb file, install it with dpkg -I, and create a postgre user. That’s it. Oh, and also the usual “config nginx and get the let’s encrypt key”.There’s also docker images, and a version for alpine linux. I haven’t tested how it works on non-Linux OSes like OpenBSD or illumos, but I’m sure if it gets popular enough someone will try to run it.The Mitra ExperienceWhen you make and login to Mitra for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a UI reminiscent of Twitter/Soapbox. It’s lightweight as well, it’s not bloated, and for a single user instance it works great. Even better, my instance isn’t running slow or hitting resource limits yet. It features the classic fedi things, from TWKN and local timelines, notifications, and bookmarks.For a single user instance, it’s probably the best instance software I’ve used simply because it’s light and doesn’t have much in the way of bloat or weirdness. Though, there are a few cons I’d like to point out as well as Mitra I wouldn’t run on a multi-user instance for one main reason: The moderation tools are inadequate.Minimal moderation toolsFor running a multi-user instance, there’s lots of tools that Pleroma has (along with other pieces of software like Misskey and Mastodon) that Mitra currently lacks. On Pleroma, administration is done with what’s called AdminFE. AdminFE is similar to “management” portals on say forum software, such as the Admin Control Panel on Xenforo. You can change all the settings without the command line, along with taking care of important moderation tasks. Pleroma also lets you defederate users, remove posts with illegal content, and more all from the main frontend.On Mitra, you cannot do any of this from the frontend. You need to use the federation filters and the mitra-ctl command from the command line on the server itself. It’s not fine-grained like Pleroma is when it comes to management. You can’t say, force spoilers on images from specific instances that post untagged porn for instance.There’s also no ability to hide timelines for logged-in users, which will be a liability if your instance gets huge and you start getting e-mails from people about a user on another instance.Essentially; while Mitra is small and lean, the critical issue is that the moderation abilities just aren’t there yet. Now Mitra is a younger piece of fedi software, only being in development for 4 years and having only 38 instances using it and 367 users overall. Possibly due to the moderation issues, it also only has 34 users on the largest instance running it. I also went to an instance where there were sign ups, and there were no captchas! In early 2024, a huge spam attack hit fedi exploiting this very thing. So, if Mitra wants to be viable for larger instances, it has a long way to go honestly.Still; it has potentialAs of now (Feb 2025), Mitra is probably one of the best things to run a single user instance on simply because it’s lightweight. But if it wants to grow and compete with even Pleroma, it needs to add moderation tools that Pleroma and the like are known for having. I’d recommend running it for a single user instance for sure, and the ease of installation is second-to-none. Yet, I feel it has a long way to go before it’ll be a bigger player on the fedi.