Rapid growth in users and activity has tested the scalability of many Mastodon servers, and has stressed their administrators. How rapid was that growth and what did it do to the servers?
All Mastodon servers are interoperable as a federated network (users on one server can seamlessly communicate with users from another one, including non-Mastodon software that implements ActivityPub).”
To run Mastodon, you need Ruby, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, and an SMTP server; https://sidekiq.org/ is a https://rubygems.org/.
You can find a lot of these reports by searching for “my own Mastodon server” or “personal Mastodon instance.”