I won't be able to use the flag EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES=profile_redesign for a while. I do not have time to redesign ours. I really think the Mastodon core team has made some poor choices lately, UX anti-patterns are popping up again. Last time, they changed post visibility under a modal that required up to six clicks and added unnecessary cognitive strain. I even sent a PR suggestion, but they rejected it.

Right now we have "Posts" and "Posts and replies" in tabs, but in the experimental profile redesign there's a "Posts" toggle that contains "Replies" and "Posts" toggles underneath it. It adds extra clicks and combines interface elements under one toggle, which just creates more friction. What's wrong with traditional tabs?

I wish they'd stop breaking what already works well. Honestly, as a long-time front-end developer, I don't understand some of these design choices. Hopefully, these experimental features will mature a bit before they make it to stable.

Issues opened:
https://github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui/issues/183
https://github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui/issues/182

Will hold off for now.

#MastoAdmin #Mastodon #MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI

What I mean specifically are these endless toggles everywhere. Click-click-click-click. Before it was just a click.

Also, why change the most used hashtags into a horizontal list? And what's with that huge button to show more pinned items? What was wrong with the old setup? The carousel wasn't great either, but I liked the version that showed them one below the other.

What problems are we actually trying to solve here?

I know these aren't shipped yet, but does anyone actually use Figma and discuss UX?

#UI #UX #MastoAdmin #Mastodon

Alt...

Toggles in Mastodon UI

Alt...

Button in Mastodon UI

We've successfully MEGA-upgraded our Mastodon server to v4.6.0-alpha.6+mementomods-2026-04-05, along with Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.6 (nightly).

This update includes today's latest daily build with 163 new commits from upstream since mementomods-2026-03-21.

What's new in Mastodon core - These are the changes Mastodon Team have introduced us in the latest nightly version we are running:

✨️ New features

- Profile redesign is now live (feature flag removed) — new layout with "Follows you" badge, split fields, rearranged number fields, featured tab, account featured tags nudge, alt text on avatars/headers
- Collections are now fully federated — remote account support, new page design, compact buttons, topic suggestions, tag linked FeaturedCollection objects over ActivityPub
- Email subscriptions on profiles — visitors can subscribe to public posts via email with MX record validation
- Profile editing — new API with character counter, field inline messages, avatar/header description uploads, visual fixes
- Support for FEP-2c59 and multiple keypairs for remote accounts
- Media description length limit increased from 1500 to 10,000 characters for remote attachments
- Improved relative time display when post time is in the future
- Disable extraneous Devise strategies option via `DISABLE_DEVISE_TWO_STRATEGIES`

🔧 Fixes & improvements

- Fix signature verification when key ID is an `acct:` URI
- Fix refreshing keys from stale actors on signature verification error
- Fix regressions in notifications caused by translation wrapper element
- Fix jump when loading more media gallery items
- Fix being unable to disable sound for quote update notification
- Fix Webfinger endpoint not handling new AP ID scheme
- Improve resilience of `tootctl maintenance fix-duplicates` command
- Improve contrast for `text-warning` and `text-success` design tokens

📦 Dependency updates

- Rails 8.1.3, Vite 8.0.3, TypeScript 6, Yarn 4.13.0, Ruby version 4.0.2
- Drop support for Ruby 3.2

🐦‍⬛ Mastodon Bird UI 4.0.0-alpha.6 (nightly)

- Fix translate button color not matching link color
- Fix extra border-left showing up in mobile devices
- Fix focusable background color standing out too much for account name
- Fix install script for Mastodon 2026-03-21 `common.scss` removal
- Fully modularize `_base.scss` into 40+ focused module files
- Fix Browsersync CSS hot reload by stripping CSP headers from proxied responses
- Support new profile page structure
- Remove calendar icon for "Joined" field no longer in new profile
- Style new profile page components and fix profile button colors
- Update theme tokens with latest design system tokens (upstream PR #38387)
- Remove select hack fixed in upstream
- Fix install script for new profile subdirectories

🔧 mementomods fork fixes

- Restored role badge colors lost in the profile redesign (reported upstream: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/38567)
- Fixed search reference page: migrated from removed `injectIntl` to `useIntl` hook, removed non-functional search operators

Source code: https://github.com/mementomori-social/mastodon

As always, if you notice anything unusual or buggy, please reach out to me or any of the admins. Enjoy your time here, and feel free to message me with any questions or thoughts.

If anything feels off, please let us know!

#MementoMoriSocial #Mastodon #MastoAdmin

I've stated numerous times that I'm not a fan of the new tag pills and boosts and replies toggle, but I tried my best to make it more manageable in my UI. I'd rather not make radical back-end changes to my fork.

OG on the left.
Mine on the right.

#MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #Mastodon #MastoAdmin

Alt...

New pinned posts OG screenshot

Alt...

New pinned posts Bird UI screenshot

Support for the new profile design is almost ready for Mastodon Bird UI v4.0.0-alpha.6 (for Mastodon nightly 4.6.0-alpha.6).

Original core Mastodon on the left.
With Mastodon Bird UI on the right.

#BuildInPublic #MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #MastoAdmin

Alt...

Mastodon default profile for v4.6.0, screenshot

Alt...

Mastodon Bird UI profile for v4.6.0, screenshot

Did some proper Monitoring metric dashboards for our Mastodon instance today. Collecting insights from the Sidekiq and Puma processes. Long overdue ! (I pushed that task, since statsD was removed from Mastodon ...)

#mastodon #mastoadmin #monitoring #grafana #prometheus

Major modularization is done for the upcoming v4.6.0 in Mastodon Bird UI v4.0.0-alpha.6 (nightly branch). Currently in progress: Supporting the latest profile page structure.
https://github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui/issues/183

#BuildInPublic #MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #MastoAdmin #Mastodon #OpenSource

It seems the newest nightly build has implemented profile_redesign, so it's no longer under the EXPERIMENTAL_FEATURES flag. That means I need to get working on the profile redesign for the Mastodon Bird UI. Today's maintenance break will last a little while longer...

#Mastodon #MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #MastoAdmin

Tootctl question
A month or so ago I had a server failure and had to roll back my Mastodon, and due to bad backups and a failed backup system, I had to roll back 9 days to the last successful backup.

I have 9 days of Mastodon media stuck in my storage with no relationship to the rolled back server and most of that media came from relays, so it is a hefty chunk of files and storage.

Will tootctl media remove-orphans remove them?

#MastoAdmin

@tux Running a pretty reasonable stack now ...

FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE-p5
Mastodon 4.5.8
PostgreSQL 18.3
Valkey 9.0.1
Opensearch (fork of Elastic) 3.2.0

28,4 GB PostgreSQL Database size
162 GB Media Files
4,88 GB Search Index size

#mastodon #mastoadmin

Did quite some maintenance on burningboard.net Mastodon instance today ..

Updated servers and jails to FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE-p5

1.
proxy_cache_path (S3 media cache) was already on a ZFS dataset with autosnapshot disabled .. But proxy_temp_path and client_body_temp_path (both nginx temp folders) weren't. Leading to extremely bloated daily ZFS snapshots for the Nginx jail. Changed those and cleaned old snapshots -> 31GB reclaimed space

2.
Cleaned up Database Snapshots and did a pg_repack on prod to reclaim deleted database pages -> 3GB reclaimed space

3.
Fixed issue with backend path over gif tunnel to Elasticsearch (6in6). Turned out to be a MSS issue (clamp-mss to 1140 solved it!)

4.
Fixed IPv6 routing issue for Prometheus Monitoring after reboot (rc.d static_routes != ipv6_static_routes)

All in all, our instance is in very good shape again :-)

#mastodon #mastoadmin #socialmedia #fediverse #freebsd #unix @tux

Just finished optimizing and checking things after being away from this machine in particular for a while. Our server stack could theoretically handle 5k more registered users and about 1500-2000 monthly active users before we'd need to start thinking about scaling up.

Right now, we have 889 users and around 410 monthly active ones and we're running at roughly 25-30% capacity. Plenty of space to grow.

We're federating with nearly 42000 other servers, which is actually the heaviest part of running an instance, not the local users. Every boost, reply, and follow across the fediverse adds work for our servers.

It was never my intention to grow this server this much or even have this many users, but now we have regular people, authors, political parties, organizations, YouTubers, and more. I'm still amazed about this. Yet I'm keeping a low profile because, even though we have our own admin team, at the end of the day this is still my hobby project organized by me and my wife.

That said, I've done my best to keep things as flexible as possible, and our finances are stable. I'm really glad my "hobby project" has brought so much joy to so many people.

If you know someone looking for a Mastodon home, we've got room 🏠

#MementoMoriSocial #MastoAdmin

Fediverse admins,

You can get a headstart on moderating your server by using ready-made server blocklists. There are many different lists to choose from, pick the one that suits your server's needs the best.

There's a guide for admins about using ready-made server blocklists on Mastodon here:

➡️ https://fedi.tips/importing-ready-made-server-blocklists-on-mastodon

There's a good roundup of many different blocklists by @oli at:

➡️ https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-blocklist

#FediAdmin #MastoAdmin #Moderation

The Universeodon relay is now back up and running and migrated to our new environment.

I'll keep an eye for a little longer just to make sure everything continues to work as expected but it should be fine as far as I can see.

#MastoAdmin

Just as a quick note for the #MastoAdmin community - The Universeodon relay is about to be migrated to new infrastructure.

I'm expecting there to be a short blip where the relay will be down while I move the config and DB from the relay to the new server and switch our load balancer to use the new server.

This will then be the final item on our legacy server cluster that needs migrating (Which is frankly long overdue!)

@evan Wait, what? If I follow hashtags on one instance, I only see stuff from that instance? Something is rotten in the state of Denm... Eh, Mastodon. #mastodon #mastoadmin #mastolivre #masto

This instance will be shut down on 2026-04-12 for legal reasons.

Why? I (@alxhu) came across the Mastodon Trademark Guidelines about one month ago, which prophibit the usage of the Mastodon wordmark in the domain name without written permission by the Mastodon GmbH.

When I created this instance, I didn't knew this. I immediatly asked for permission but didn't recieve an answer (even after messaging multiple times again), so I assume the answer is no

#instanceshutdown #mastoadmin #mastodon

@mastodonlgbt @alxhu Just so you know: When they released the trademark policy they made statements saying that they would permit instances that use the mastodon name in good faith and predated the policy.

I'm not aware of a change of that position since.

My own instance use mstdn in the url (IIRC also covered by the trademark) and based on this statement I am keeping my instance up.

May @andypiper can advise?

#mastoadmin

RE: https://mastodon.lgbt/@mastodonlgbt/116318629726348167

I will shut down mastodon.lgbt in about two weeks.

This instance (greifswald.lgbt) is NOT affected.

#instanceshutdown #mastoadmin #mastodon

mastodon.lgbt-Administration » 🌐 2026-03-30 / 2026-03-30
@mastodonlgbt@mastodon.lgbt

This instance will be shut down on 2026-04-12 for legal reasons.

Why? I (@alxhu) came across the Mastodon Trademark Guidelines about one month ago, which prophibit the usage of the Mastodon wordmark in the domain name without written permission by the Mastodon GmbH.

When I created this instance, I didn't knew this. I immediatly asked for permission but didn't recieve an answer (even after messaging multiple times again), so I assume the answer is no

#instanceshutdown #mastoadmin #mastodon

Hi Mastodon-Admins,

I'm the admin of an instance running on v4.3.21 and would like to upgrade to v4.5.0. In the 4.5.0 release notes I can see the update steps for v4.4.8.

Is there any chance I can update directly from v4.3.21 to v4.4.8 or do I have to sequentially update through all the minor releases v4.4.0-v4.4.8?

#mastoadmins #mastoadmin #sysadmins

@paul @maddad @mastodonmigration @chad what could I do as #mastoadmin to prevent known mastodon AI commercial scrapers to harvest data posted by members of our community?

@gubi @paul @maddad @mastodonmigration @chad Preventing known AI scrapers is easy as #mastoadmin: Just block the User Agent (in this case Zeitgeist/1.0 (social feed summarizer; https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist)).

(see https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/57e5bd5f012be31c90df1602de37d8b4e7aa143b/lib/mastodon.ts#L1 for source)

For unknown ones it's much harder ...

My test mastodon instance has been upgraded to v4.5.8, easy peasy.

Stop Services
ProxMox Snapshot
Fetch 4.5.8
Build
Start Services

Now that I say it was easy I have cursed myself tho.

Also I hate that I can't use checkbox emojis now because it looks like AI wrote the post. Batman it is.

#Homelab #MastoAdmin

We just released Mastodon 4.5.8, 4.4.15, and 4.3.21.

These versions contain various bug fixes, including fixes for medium severity security issues.

Full release notes and update instructions are available on the GitHub releases page.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases

#mastoadmin