Tootfinder

Despite the small team size,
Mastodon operates two large, production Mastodon instances:
mastodon.social
Runs on Kubernetes with autoscaling between 9 and 15 nodes (16 cores, 64 GB RAM each). Web frontend scale between 5 and 20 pods, while various Sidekiq worker pools scale between 10 and 40 pods. On average, mastodon.social has 70–80 pods running at any given time. This platform handles up to 300,000 active users per day and approximately 10 million requests per minute.
ma…

How Mastodon Runs OpenTelemetry Collectors in Production
At the beginning of 2025, the OpenTelemetry Developer Experience SIG published the results of its first community survey. One of the strongest themes was clear: teams want more real-world examples of how the OpenTelemetry SDKs and the OpenTelemetry Collector are actually used in production. To help close that gap, the SIG began collecting stories directly from end users—across industries, architectures, and company sizes. This post kicks off a new series focused specifically on organizationsâ…