Mastodon itself is designed for "flagship scale" (given lead developers run mastodon.social and mastodon.online, two of the biggest instances and the most "dogfooding" two instances) so it bundles an entire cluster of services: background processors (sidekiq), caches (redis, I think?), database server (postgres), optional ElastiCache, and more. I don't know how much Ruby itself accounts for expensive overhead, but just running all of those other things on a single server vertically for a single user instance is a massive, expensive overhead. (It's clearly built for horizontal scale where your background services and caches and database servers may all be different clusters of VMs/servers over vertical stack efficiency when "scaled down" from the "natural" "mastodon.social scale" that Mastodon is most optimized for.)

It's an interesting optimization problem reminder that scaling factors are different for different needs and not everything scales cleanly to every use case. A single user instance should be able to use a much smaller vertical stack, but scaling down from a wide horizontal stack is not necessarily the best or cheapest place to start when building something like that.

(There are some interesting projects I've seen to build single user instances with much less overhead, shorter vertical stacks. I'm curious to see where those efforts go. In my own usage of Mastodon my "single user" instance gets the benefits of the horizontal scaling Mastodon was built for because my hosting provider does a bunch of work to make sure that they take advantage of that economy of scale to host many small instances for cheaper than trying to run small instances in one-off VMs.)