One viral post means ten thousand RSA signatures. On shared hosting that's a crash in seconds. FediFuel signs, delivers, verifies and retries it all for you — over a lightweight signed handshake — so your server stays quiet and your community stays online.
@alice
alice@instance.example
this post is about to break the server, sorry in advance 🔥
10,000+
RSA signatures for a single viral post
×1000s
followers, each needing a signed delivery
0%
of that CPU used by your PHP server
$5/mo
shared hosting that dies trying to do it
The problem
ActivityPub is beautiful — and hungry. Every single message you send or receive carries cryptographic work, and the fediverse hands that work to whoever is hosting you. On a shared server there is no queue, no headroom, no mercy.
Every outbound message is signed with RSA-2048 or Ed25519. Signing is measured in signatures-per-second, and a busy account burns real CPU just existing.
One post goes to every follower — individually signed, individually delivered over DNS + TLS + HTTP. 100 followers = 100 deliveries. 10,000 = a firehose.
Each inbound message must have its remote HTTP signature verified, headers parsed, digests checked. Bot storms and boost waves amplify the cost on every hop.
WebFinger lookups and actor-document fetches hit your server whenever anyone on the network searches for or follows you. Small but constant background load.
A slow or down remote server means exponential backoff and re-delivery, stacking more work onto a box that is already drowning.
One post that gets boosted across the network triggers a synchronized burst of outbound signing and inbound verification. PHP-FPM tops out, the queue backs up, and your instance returns 503 in seconds.
06:12 — @alice posts. 400 followers. Nothing special.
07:31 — a big account boosts it. The firehose opens: 2,100 new followers, each needing a signed delivery.
07:32 — the fediverse replies. Inbox verification starts piling up behind the outbound queue.
07:33 — PHP-FPM hits max_children. Every request waits. The site 503s for hours.
$ tail -f /var/log/instance.log
✓ follower add — mock.social
✓ follower add — pie.town
✓ follower add — social.example
▸ signing Create#9921 … rsa_sign: 84ms
▸ signing Create#9922 … rsa_sign: 91ms
▸ signing Create#9923 … rsa_sign: 89ms
… 9,488 more deliveries queued …
!! PHP-FPM max_children reached
!! HTTP 503 — Service Unavailable
(the fediverse waits for no one)
Why it matters
It just deserves hosting that can keep up. Here's what we're protecting.
Communities own their space, their rules and their data. No corporate pivot wipes your feed overnight.
ActivityPub and AT Protocol are open standards. You can always leave, migrate or self-host — nobody can lock you in.
Your timeline is chronological and yours. Nothing is hidden behind a feed-ranking black box.
Follow, reply and get discovered across thousands of independent servers — not a walled garden.
No single point of failure. But decentralization only works if every node can actually keep its promises.
Open source, volunteer-run and radically transparent — the antidote to the attention economy.
The fediverse shouldn't die on a five-dollar server.
It should hum along on whatever hardware a community can afford — because the heavy, boring crypto work lives somewhere else.
Show me howThe FediFuel way
Your instance keeps doing what it does best — storing posts and rendering pages. FediFuel takes everything cryptographic and lets you get back to running a community.
Sign up and register your domain. FediFuel issues your API key and signing secrets instantly.
Paste one config block into your instance. The FediFuel module hands every federated event to us over a signed HTTP call.
We sign, deliver, verify and retry. Your shared host stays quiet — even when the fediverse gets loud.
FediFuel owns the keys, the signatures and the delivery queue — so a viral moment becomes a metric you watch, not an outage you apologise for.
How the handshake works
Every event is authenticated with a per-tenant HMAC bridge handshake and a replay window — your instance is the only one that can talk to your offloader.
Pricing
Offload from day one with no credit card. Only pay when your instance is actually making the fediverse busier.
Prove it on your own instance.
For communities that are actually growing.
Prices are illustrative for the pilot. FediFuel is in early access — feedback shapes the roadmap.
Point your instance at FediFuel, install the module, and let the engine carry the load. Your community stays up. Your hosting stays cheap.