I feel like Mastodon's requirements are becoming so high, you already have to run an infrastructure business, have deep pockets, or willing to make considerable compromises to run it.

Rails is CPU and memory-hangry, on top of needing a postgres and redis server (both of which are probably the /lightest/ parts of the stack), and now ES on top of it all.

I don't believe this is the way it should be.

(Yes, I know of Pleroma, don't evangelise me, that's not what this is about)

"But you don't /need/ ES"

That's one of those compromises I was speaking of.

You already need like a $10-15/mo VPS to run it (if you don't really give a damn about how fast it runs so long as it does so at all), and ES on one of those tiers of VPS is asking too much. ES does not run well in very little RAM, especially for larger instances. It's a typical JVM memory-hangry piece of shit in that sense.