Mastodon@EPFL (aka social.epfl.ch)

This repository hold the code to deploy EPFL's Mastodon server with Ansible. It can be accessed at https://social.epfl.ch.

About

Since February 2025, EPFL host its own instance of Mastodon on https://social.epfl.ch.

Mastodon is an open source, self-hosted, social networking service. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation which allows users to communicate between independent Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub compatible services. Mastodon has microblogging features similar to Twitter, and is generally considered to be a part of the Fediverse. (Read more on wikipedia)

Bird's view

This repo uses Ansible with a wrapper that install it locally called Ansible suitcase. The Mastodon blocks are deployed with Docker on the remote hosts, following the official Docker deployment method¹. It results of the deployment of 5 containers (mastodon-web, mastodon-postgresql, mastodon-redis, mastodon-sidekiq and mastodon-streaming). Containers prometheus, node-exporter and alertmanager ensure some basic observability and alerting. On top of that, the traefik containers deals with all HTTP requests and offers the Let's Encrypt TLS certificate to users.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/main/docker-compose.yml ↩