Do you need Mastodon, or can it be something similar? Mastodon does a lot of caching. For my single-user instance I run Akkoma, which is very leight-weight and has all (even more) features Mastodon has.
I created mastodon.world just because it sounded cool and it was available. The first banner I used for that was a 'Hello World' image so yes that was referring to scripting.
Later I registered some more .world domains like Lemmy.world (and calckey.world and some more yet to be launched)
Rsync works fine for most data. (I use borgbackup) For any database data, create a dump using pg_dump or mysqldump or whatever. Then backup the dump and all other volumes but exclude the db volume.