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Fully Managed Mastodon
as a Service

Deploy Mastodon as a fully managed service starting at €9/mo. Get automated backups, SSL, updates, support and monitoring included.

Mastodon is an open-source federated microblogging platform — short posts, follows, replies, boosts — combining the conversational shape of X with the ownership and portability of self-hosted infrastructure. Your instance speaks ActivityPub, so your users can follow and be followed by anyone on Threads, Pixelfed, Misskey, or any other federating server, without giving up control of your domain.

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA  No credit card  Cancel anytime

Free 7-day trial  99.9% Uptime SLA
No credit card  Cancel anytime

Mastodon

Mastodon

STARTING AT

€9/month
Automated Backups
Monitoring
Automated Updates
Auto SSL

USAGE

Unlimited
Human Support
Custom Domains
Terminal Access
File Manager Access
Deploy in your region 21 locations worldwide
GermanyFinlandNetherlandsUKSwedenUnited StatesCanadaSingaporeJapanAustraliaBrazilSouth Africa+9 more →
Mastodon Preview Image

ABOUT THE SOFTWARE

What is Mastodon

Mastodon is open-source federated microblogging software. Each instance is its own server with its own users, rules, and domain. Instances talk to each other via the ActivityPub protocol, so your users can follow and be followed by anyone running compatible software — Threads, Pixelfed, Misskey, PeerTube — without giving up control of your domain or data.

The project was started by Eugen Rochko in 2016 and is now developed by Mastodon GmbH in Germany, with a US 501(c)(3) sister entity, Mastodon Inc., established in 2024 to receive tax-deductible donations. The codebase is AGPLv3, written in Ruby on Rails with a Node.js streaming server, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Sidekiq for background jobs. ElasticSearch or OpenSearch is optional and powers full-text search across the local timeline.

The network spans thousands of active instances and several million monthly active users. Public-sector adopters include the European Commission and Germany's federal data-protection office. Open-source projects, journalism collectives, and university research groups run their own instances — Fosstodon, Hachyderm, infosec.exchange, journa.host, scholar.social — each with its own moderation policy, rules, and federation choices.

FEATURES

What Mastodon does

Mastodon is a microblogging server that speaks ActivityPub. Users post short messages, follow accounts on any federating server, share images and video, and conduct conversations across the wider fediverse. Each instance sets its own posting rules, moderation policy, and federation list — your instance, your domain, your defaults.

Federation via ActivityPub

Speaks the standard ActivityPub protocol. Users can follow, reply to, and boost anyone on Threads, Pixelfed, Misskey, PeerTube, or any other compatible server.

Configurable post length

Default 500-character posts can be raised in config — many academic and journalism instances run at 1,000-2,000 characters for citation-friendly threading.

Full-text search (optional)

Opt-in ElasticSearch or OpenSearch indexing for your local timeline. RAM cost is roughly 1 GB. Small instances often run without it.

Account migration in and out

Built-in migration tools move followers and follows to and from any other Mastodon instance. Posts stay on the originating instance.

Custom domain and branding

Your instance lives on your own domain. Custom emoji, themes, and welcome text. The handle becomes a verified identity across the wider network.

Quote posts and threading

Native quote posts shipped in Mastodon 4.5. Threaded conversations, content warnings, and granular reply controls are built in.

Federation controls

Instance-level allow-lists, block-lists, and limited-federation mode. Defederation actions are reversible. Synced blocklists from groups like #fediblock.

Moderation tooling

Per-instance moderation queues, report routing, role-based admin permissions, and detailed audit logs of every moderator action.

WHAT'S ALWAYS INCLUDED

Every app. Fully managed.
Nothing extra to pay for.

Every app you deploy includes the full managed service — security, backups, updates, and support from day one.

Automatic updates and patches

Apps run the latest stable version. Security patches applied silently, with rollback if needed.

Daily off-site backups

Multiple daily backups in redundant off-site locations. One-click restore if anything goes wrong.

24/7 uptime monitoring

Continuous monitoring with instant alerting. We respond before you notice.

SSL, firewall, DDoS protection

Auto-renewing SSL, hardened firewall rules, DDoS mitigation on every deployment.

Performance and scaling

We monitor resource usage continuously. When your app needs more headroom, we flag it and upgrade with your explicit approval.

Dedicated engineering support

Real engineers on chat. DNS, SMTP & migration help. All included in €9.

WHY MANAGED

Why teams pick managed Mastodon

In December 2025, X blocked the European Commission from advertising after a €120 million regulatory fine. The lesson generalized: an organization's social presence on a platform it doesn't own can be silenced by a single executive decision. Owning a Mastodon instance is the durable answer — running one yourself is the hard part.

Mastodon is a federating Rails application with five moving parts that all need to be alive at once: Puma serves the web UI, Node serves the streaming API, Sidekiq runs six job queues for inbound and outbound federation, PostgreSQL stores the entire timeline, and Redis caches sessions and queue state. Most of the operational pain comes from Sidekiq.

A stock install ships a single Sidekiq process handling all six queues. The moment a remote viral post fans out to your users, the default queue — which builds local notifications and home timelines — backlogs into the hundreds of thousands of jobs. Admins on the official Mastodon GitHub Discussions have reported 650,000-job backlogs producing 10-hour timeline lag, and 20-hour catch-up windows after version upgrades. The fix requires splitting each queue into its own systemd-managed process, raising the database connection pool, and tuning PostgreSQL's max_connections in lockstep — none of which is in the README.

REVIEWS

Hear from customers ​like you​​​​​​​

Successful businesses and professionals around the world rely on DANIAN every day

USE CASES

Three teams who run Mastodon on DANIAN

These are representative team types we set up most often. Each starts with the same flat €9 plan.

9-PERSON CLIMATE RESEARCH NONPROFIT

Building a science-communication presence X can't switch off

Germany region for low-latency peering. ElasticSearch enabled — adds 1 GB RAM — so 200 monthly-active researchers can search across long-form citation threads. Storage configured with tootctl media remove --days 14. A bot account cross-posts new preprints from the lab's Zenodo DOI feed. Defederation list synced with the #fediblock allow-list every Sunday.

24-REPORTER JOURNALISM COLLECTIVE

Verified reporter identity without renting verification from a paid platform

USA datacenter region for newsroom latency. Sidekiq queues split into per-queue systemd processes — default at 60 threads, pull at 40 — anticipating breaking-news fanout. Post character limit raised from 500 to 1,500 so a lede paragraph fits in one toot. rel="me" verification on each reporter's bio links to the masthead page. Daily tootctl media remove --days 7.

4,200-FACIULTY COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE

Institutional brand and data residency without a Rails team

Canada region matching the institution's data-residency requirements. SSO via institutional SAML. ElasticSearch off — keeps RAM at 8 GB on the shared VM. Per-department custom emoji packs. Defederation list synced with the higher-ed Mastodon trust group; rel="me" verification on faculty profile pages.

COMPARISON

Four ways to run Mastodon

The math at any organization size, comparing the three real alternatives to managed Mastodon. Paid-platform tiers, self-host on a VPS with your own DevOps, run a server in your office, or pay a flat €9 per app per month and let us run the federation plumbing.

Path 1 — Paid platform tiers. X (formerly Twitter) sells organizational presence through Premium Business: $200/month for Basic, $1,000/month for Full Access, plus $50/month per affiliated employee. You get a verification check and ranking boost. You do not get your domain, your data, or any guarantee against being switched off the platform.

Path 2 — Self-host on a VPS. Mastodon's official documentation, real admin postmortems, and the upstream GitHub Discussions all describe the same operational shape: a $24/month production-class VPS, $5/month object storage, $15/month monitoring, plus 1-2 hours every month patching, watching Sidekiq queue depth, and running tootctl cleanup. At freelance-sysadmin rates that is €60-240/month in time alone.

Path 3 — Home server. A Synology DS923+ or business-grade mini-PC runs Mastodon, but you also pay business-grade internet with a static IP, electricity for 24/7 operation, off-site backup storage, and the operational time to run all of it. €210-667/month effective, plus hardware amortized over three years.

Path 4 — Managed by DANIAN. Flat €9/month per app at the base tier. Sidekiq tuning, retention cron, and a human on chat are all included. The math holds at 1 admin, 5 admins, or 10 — your bill doesn't grow with your team.

 PATH1 ADMIN5 ADMINS10 ADMINSYOU OWN THE DOMAIN SIDEIQ TUNNING MEDIA RETENTION CRON IF IT BREAKS AT 2AM
X Premium Business
$1,000/mo$1,200/mo$1,450/moNo (subdomain on x.com) N/A (rented)
N/AFile a support ticket
Self-host on a VPS
~€100-280/mo (infra + time)Same per instanceSame per instanceYesTEYouTYouYou wake up
Home server
~€210-667/mo (infra + time)Same per instanceSame per instanceYesYouYouYou wake up
DANIAN Managed Mastodon€9/mo€9/mo€9/moYesWe doWe doWe're already on it

BY INDUSTRY

Mastodon for specific industries

Four configurations where running Mastodon on DANIAN solves a specific operational problem better than either renting from a paid platform or building from scratch. The configuration changes by industry — character limit, ElasticSearch on or off, federation policy, retention cron — and so does the workflow.

Public bodies need durable channels — durable meaning a single executive decision somewhere else can't take them down, and traceable meaning posts can be retained, audited, and produced on request without depending on a third-party vendor's retention policy.

DANIAN's default for government deployments enables limited-federation mode, with an allow-list of vetted peer instances (other government bodies, sister agencies, official partners) curated by your moderators.

Records retention is configured to keep your local posts indefinitely, while remote media is pruned on a 7-day cron.

A typical municipal deployment runs 200-500 monthly active staff accounts and federates with 30-50 peer government instances.

Your domain. Your records. Your control over who can talk to your users — and who can't.
Universities have two specific Mastodon needs that off-the-shelf software doesn't address: long-form citation-friendly posts and FERPA-conscious data handling for any instance carrying student accounts.

DANIAN raises the default 500-character post limit to 1,500 for research-group instances — long enough to include a citation block and a methods note.

ElasticSearch indexing is opt-in: enable it for 1 GB extra RAM and let 200+ researchers search across their local timeline, or leave it off on small instances where Postgres trigram search is enough. SSO via institutional SAML maps faculty handles to verified identities. rel="me" verification connects each researcher's Mastodon profile to their university faculty page.

Real reference deployments at scholar.social and affiliated university instances run for years on 8-16 GB of RAM.
Newsrooms need three things from their social presence: verified identity, breaking-news bandwidth, and the ability to keep operating when their primary platform changes policy overnight.

DANIAN configures journalism instances with split Sidekiq queues — default queue at 60 threads, pull queue at 40 — so a viral story fans out without the timeline collapsing.

The post character limit is raised to 1,500 for lede paragraphs. Each reporter's bio uses rel="me" verification linking back to the masthead page on the publisher's domain, producing a verified-by-domain checkmark visible across the fediverse.

Real reference deployment: journa.host, a Mastodon instance for over a thousand verified journalists, has been running since 2022.
Open-source communities want infrastructure that matches their values — no algorithmic feed, no advertising, no engagement-optimization heuristic, no opaque moderation.

DANIAN's open-source community deployments default to ElasticSearch on for full-text discoverability across the local timeline, custom emoji and theme uploads enabled, and a webhook integration that posts CI/release notifications from GitHub Actions to a project bot account. rel="me" verification ties each contributor's Mastodon handle to their GitHub profile.

Coordinated disclosure norms — keeping security advisories confidential until coordinated release — are operational rather than regulatory, but they're easier to enforce on infrastructure you own.

Real reference deployments: Fosstodon, infosec.exchange, and Hachyderm each run 5,000-30,000 monthly active accounts, with documented scaling postmortems the maintainers have published openly.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before signing up — answered straight, without sales speak.

Three groups: technical setup, migration, and how DANIAN works as a service.

01

Technical and configuration

We default to a nightly tootctl media remove --days 7 and tootctl preview_cards remove --days 7 cron — remote media older than 7 days is pruned, freeing disk. The separate 'remote content retention period' admin setting is destructive (it deletes posts you've bookmarked or boosted), so we leave it blank by default. If you want longer retention or specific exemptions, message us.
Yes if you opt in. Threads (Meta) began federating with ActivityPub for US/Canada/Japan users in March 2024 and has expanded since. The integration is partial — Threads users can see your posts and follow back, but replies, DMs, and quote-posts don't fully cross the boundary. We can block Threads at the instance level if you'd rather not federate with Meta-controlled servers. Your moderators choose.
Defederation is a per-instance moderation decision — a large server defederating your instance just means their users can't see your posts and vice versa. Your instance keeps running normally for everyone else. We help with the moderation conversation if it's recoverable, and we sync your defederation list against shared community blocklists if you want. Defederation actions are reversible at either end.
Stock Mastodon's federation pipeline starts straining around 100 active users if you follow accounts on large remote instances, because the pull and default Sidekiq queues backlog under fanout. We size Sidekiq workers, Postgres connections, and Puma threads for the actual load on your instance — not a template — and watch queue depth continuously. Real reference: Hachyderm's published scaling postmortems describe the exact tuning we ship by default.
Mastodon supports changing the LOCAL_DOMAIN environment variable, but the migration is non-trivial — federated posts retain the old domain, and the new domain has to be set up before the cutover. We do this migration for you: schedule a maintenance window, coordinate DNS, run the database updates, and confirm federation is healthy on the new domain. No charge for the migration time.

02

Migration and onboarding

We can activate your app on your own custom domain/subdomain. Examples: mydomain.com, anyword.mydomain.com.
Or, on our randomized free subdomain. Example: 963.apps.danian.cloud
If you wish to use a custom domain/subdomain, select that option when ordering your app (or notify us later). We will send you the required DNS records and if needed, our tech team will modify them for you.
21 datacenter locations across six continents. You choose the region at provisioning. Application data sits in the region you choose; pick whichever is closest to your users or matches your data-residency preference.
Yes. Request a region migration from the dashboard and we run the move in the background. The system emails you when the migration completes; total transfer time depends on data volume but typical instances finish in a few hours. There is no extra charge for a region change.
Yes. Full data export is available at any time, in a portable format you can bring to any infrastructure.
Yes, Mastodon has built-in account migration tooling. Each user goes to Preferences → Account → Move to a different account, sets an alias on both sides, and runs the migration. Followers transfer automatically. Posts remain on the originating instance (Mastodon does not move post content), but the user's identity and follow graph land on yours.
We run a managed SMTP relay tuned for transactional email deliverability — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are configured per-instance, and bounces are monitored. You can plug in your own SMTP provider if you prefer to send through your own deliverability infrastructure.

03

Billing, support, and platform

€9 covers everything we do for that app: hardware in the region you choose, daily off-site backups with one-click restore, automatic security patches and version upgrades, 24/7 monitoring, SSL and firewall, and engineering support on Email/LiveChat. There are no setup fees or hidden line items. For more info see our Pricing page.
If you decide to continue, we charge €9/app/month from day 8. If you don't, the trial ends and you can export your data. No card is required for the trial, and we never auto-charge you without explicit consent.
No. The €9/month is flat regardless of how many users log into your app. Add 5 users or 50; the price doesn't change.
24/7 Live chat and email support, both staffed by engineers who run the systems. We handle DNS configuration, SMTP setup, app integrations, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and migration help. Response time is typically under an hour. There is no tier system — every customer gets the same support.
Yes. Cancel from the dashboard. We don't charge a cancellation fee, we don't lock data, and we will export your data to you on request before deletion. data to you on request before deletion.
Every customer instance is backed up daily to a separate region from the primary. We test restores. You can request a restore at any backup point within the retention window — usually 7 days for daily backups.
Your application data sits in the region you choose at provisioning — 21 datacenter locations across six continents. Account-level data (billing, account email, support ticket history) is processed centrally. Application data region is picked by you, per app.
99.9% uptime SLA on every app, every tenant. Service credits are documented at danian.co/service-level-agreement. The status page is located at status.danian.co.
When your tenant approaches the resource ceiling — the base tier holds 1 vCPU/RAM, 30 GB storage — we notify you. Resource upgrades happen with your explicit consent; we will not upgrade your tenant or charge you without it.
We wait. We don't suspend the app or delete your data on the first failed charge. We email you, you fix the card on file, and we continue.
Invoices can be downloaded from the billing dashboard in PDF the day each charge succeeds. EU VAT is added where applicable and the VAT-reverse-charge regime applies for VAT-registered businesses with a valid number.
150+ open-source apps across automation, team chat, file sync, analytics, AI, password management, email marketing, dev tools, project management, smart home, CMS, and federated social. See the full catalog →
Yes. Every instance comes with a web-based terminal and a file manager in your DANIAN management dashboard. Useful for managing your data and customizations.
Resources scale with your usage. If your app needs more vCPU, RAM, or storage, we add it — and we ask first before any change to your plan. €9 is the floor; resource-heavy workloads may price higher, but you'll always know in advance.
Yes. We have both a Partner program and an Affiliate program available. Anybody can sign up.
No contract. No minimum commitment. Cancel anytime from the dashboard with one click. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card. After the trial converts to paid, you can still cancel at any month without notice or penalty.

DEPLOY IN YOUR REGION

21 datacenter locations on six continents

Pick the region closest to your users.

United States, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Sweden, Malaysia, India, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Chile, South Africa and more coming soon

Global Reach Map

Try managed Mastodon for 7 days

No card. Cancel from the dashboard.