Head's up, there appears to be someone (or entity) cloning people off Twitter onto Mastodon and (attempting) to use those users to send out spam/scams/etc. All the "cloned" people are showing up on Mastodon.social at the moment. #MastoAdmin

A new @iftas report brings insights from fediverse moderators, administrators, and community managers: worsening mod-to-user ratio, spam, burnout, lack of tools.

"Moderators are the backbone of a safer social web – but most are unpaid, under-supported, and under constant strain. If we want a future for decentralised platforms that respects user agency, civil speech, and community autonomy, we need to support the infrastructure that keeps it safe."

https://about.iftas.org/2026/01/08/the-2025-social-web-trust-safety-report-is-here/

#fediverse #FediAdmin #MastoAdmin #SocialMedia #IFTAS

Did upgrade all the remaining service jails on our burningborad.net Mastodon instance to FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE today, after the host was already upgraded one and a half week ago.

Everything running smoothly :) Only nodejs in the mastodonweb jail needed some additional "convincing" and a deletion of the node_modules folder plus a fresh "yarn install --frozen-lockfile"

Now everything is up to date again 🙂

#freebsd #bastillebsd #jails #sysadmin #mastoadmin #upgrade #mastodon

Alt...

Screenshot of "bastille list", showing that all Jails (database, factorio, mastodonsidekiq, mastodonweb and nginx) run on 15.0-RELEASE (the latest FreeBSD release)

#Mastodon Update 4.5.4 ✅
#mastoadmin

Whoop whoop. Wir sind kurz weg. Damit es für euch bisschen sicherer wird ;)
Wir aktualisieren auf V4.5.4

Bis gleich

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

#MastoAdmin #AfterSpace

I'm getting Vite Failed with v4.5.4 upgrade from vanilla v4.5.3 installed. #MastoAdmin

'baseline-browser-mapping data in this module is over two months old. To ensure accurate Baseline data, please update: npm i baseline-browser-mapping@latest -D

PID #### Exit 137.
Build with Vite Failed X'

#Mastodon

phpc.social is now running on Mastodon 4.5.4, released about an hour and 40 minutes ago. #mastoAdmin

Die Instanz https://watzmann.social läuft jetzt mit Softwareversion v4.5.4

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.5.4

#mastodon #mastoadmin #upgrade

Die Instanz https://bayerwald.social läuft jetzt mit Softwareversion v4.5.4

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.5.4

#mastodon #mastoadmin #upgrade

RE: https://don.linxx.net/@ose_rouge/115413938019772042

Exakt der Trupp ist auf Bluesky sehr aktiv in Bezug auf Mobilisierung und Stimmungsmache zum 17.01. in Connewitz. Deshalb (weiterhin) die Instanz @linksextrem.ist blocken, bitte. #MastoAdmin #FediBlock

#Connewitz #ConneIsland #LinXXNet #L1701 #Antisemitismus.

RE: https://goingdark.social/@fanfare/115726138546662109

This outage showed me how much I love this little instance. At the same time, it reminded me that I won't be able to run it completely alone forever.

Teaming up with others would make it stronger and more fun for everyone.If you're interested in helping out, whether you already know Kubernetes or Mastodon administration or you're just curious and willing to learn, please DM me.

Experience isn't required. Enthusiasm is what matters.It could be reviewing configs, handling updates, writing wiki pages, moderating reports, or jumping in for bigger moments.

Occasional help is welcome, and becoming a co-admin would be amazing.

No pressure at all. I'd just love to share the journey with someone who cares about the Fediverse. Thank you! ❤️

#MastodonAdmin #Kubernetes #Fediverse #Community #parenting #mastoadmin

We have moved to approval-required registration in response to coordinated bot attacks affecting the fediverse. This protects our users, but the platform forces a binary choice: open registration that enables spam and harassment, or approval queues that lose legitimate users to friction.

The fediverse deserves better. There is an open proposal for improved registration options that would benefit instances across the network: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/36747

If your instance has faced similar challenges, or if you believe better moderation tools would strengthen the fediverse, please engage with this proposal. This affects all of us.

Registration will reopen when it's safe to do so. The fediverse should not be an exclusive place. This is a temporary measure, taken as a last resort to protect not just our users, but to minimize the impact these attacks have on the wider network.

#mastoadmin #goingdark

Dear #Mastodon users and #MastoAdmin: Why am unable to follow @devontechnologies@devontechnologies.com from my personal instance (from which I am posting this)?

Entering my instance name in the other instance’s Follow dialog results in this link, which gives me a generic Mastodon error page: https://mastodon.phoenixtrap.com/authorize_interaction?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fmastodon.devontechnologies.com%2Fusers%2Fdevontechnologies

Am I possibly misconfigured, or are they?

Why do you sometimes get filtered notifications? How are they "flagged" and what does it signify? #mastoadmin

Have any Mastodon administrators managed to migrate their server to a different physical machine without significant downtime? Considering this by spinning up a replica and multiple web servers, and then switching over the databases... if that's possible. #MastoAdmin

We take data-safety of our Mastodon user data serious and have implemented multiple levels of backups with rigorous bi-yearly restore tests and documentation.

We do:
- Periodic local file system snapshots (Every 15 minutes).

- Filesystem replication to backup-server in Germany (Hetzner, Falkenstein).

- Filesystem replication to second backup-server in Switzerland (Equinix ZH4, Zürich).

- GPG Encrypted Application-layer backup (PostgreSQL, Mastodon configuration) to server from @tux in Germany.

Every single of those backup-layers is monitored, tested (and recover-tested) bi-yearly at least.

Our infrastructure runs on FreeBSD/ZFS with one backup-layer using "zfs send/recv" plus an addition application backup layer that's using pg_dump+gpg. Just to be on the safe side.

All backup-jobs are monitored and the status (success/fail) is transperently visible on https://status.burningboard.net/

#mastodon #mastoadmin #freebsd #zfs #backups #digitalindipendence

We have some network issues. #mastoadmin

This month's Mastodon Hosting Invoice is a good kick-up-the-arse for me to make some changes in 2026.

In the meantime, a big THANK YOU to everyone who contribute cash to the running costs. If you want to join that gang, use the links below:

https://qr.vipps.no/box/6fc8a0e2-8c86-41b4-a150-61eb93bb9185/pay-in
https://ko-fi.com/oslotown
https://www.patreon.com/oslotown
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=WXPRUQKVRASHN

Goodnight

#Mastodon #MastoAdmin #Oslo #Allheimen #Fediverse #NorskTut

Seit einigen Tagen werden Medien meiner Mastodon-Instanz metalhead.club global verteilt über ein eigenes CDN ausgeliefert.

Das verringert die Latenzen für Benutzer aus nicht-EU Ländern und sorgt für weniger Frust bei den Ladezeiten.

Was ein CDN ist, welche Implementierungsmethoden es gibt und wie ich mein kleines CDN umgesetzt habe, erfahrt ihr in meinem neuen Blogpost:

"Ein eigenes kleines CDN für meine Mastodon-Instanz metalhead.club" - https://thomas-leister.de/mastodon-media-storage-cdn/

#metalheadclub #cdn #media #mastodon #instance #mastoadmin #hosting #selfhosting #nginx #scaleway #dns #geoip #geodns #hetzner

Alt...

Eine Weltkarte zeigt die Zugriffslatenzen auf den Metalhead.club Medienspeicher.

As a bit of a different one, I have just had an e-mail from Nick who founded and setup #MedMastodon after I offered to take over the site following it's short notice closure just before the new year, he has come back now to confirm he's happy for me to take on the running the maintenance of the site and has looped in the team from Masto.Host to progress this.

I'm hoping that means we can get the site back up and running in the not too distant future and I'll look to get it migrated over to the same infrastructure that we use for MastodonApp.UK and Universeodon.com to hopefully give some better flexibility for growth and benefit from the existing work and scale in place.

I'll keep folks updated as and when I hear more and as we progress getting the site back online.

#MastoAdmin

Another migration complete. Our Mastodon instance burningboard.net now has a working full-text search again!

Before:
Elasticsearch 7.x on Debian Linux

Now:
Opensearch 3.2.0 on FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE

Importing 2 billion(!) docs into the search index took a couple of hours, but now that piece of infrastructure is also modernized and fully operational.

For performance reasons, opensearch runs on a seperate physical server than the rest of the Mastodon instance itself.

#elasticsearch #opensearch #linux #freebsd #mastodon #mastoadmin /cc @tux

If you value free speech, you get your friends and family onto the fediverse RIGHT NOW.

I don't raise the alarm much and I'm a really shitty prepper, but I'm seeing what is going on and I also know the history of WWII.

The moment Trump tries to take Greenland, the gloves are off.

I took Social Studies. We're staring down the barrel of WWIII.

#mastoadmin

Does anyone know why using tootctl to bulk import emoji gives me a networking error? I feel like this has to do with my usage of S3 storage. I ran RAILS_ENV=production bin/tootctl emoji import emoji.tar.gz and got /home/mastodon/live/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.4.0/gems/net-protocol-0.2.2/lib/net/protocol.rb:229:in 'Net::BufferedIO#rbuf_fill': Net::ReadTimeout with #<TCPSocket:(closed)> (Seahorse::Client::NetworkingError)

#mastodon #mastoadmin

Perhaps someone can recommend some good relays one can add to a newly-created Mastodon instance to help with federation?

#mastodon #selfhosting #mastoadmin

RE: https://mementomori.social/@rolle/115830860141268596

I've implemented this design on datasci.social now via Custom CSS. Looks much better than the default - great work by @rolle!

Instance members: please let me know if this causes any problems. If there are no big concerns within a week, I would use it for good. #mastoadmin

toot.io relay service boosted

Roni Rolle Laukkarinen » 🌐 2026-01-03
@rolle@mementomori.social

@caterpillar Thanks! It's used by a few hundred instances now, most notably Vivaldi's.

After leaving Twitter, I just wanted to bring back that 2019 feel. Some UI and UX patterns have already been proven to work, and it's great (unlike Twitter was) Mastodon is open source so I can customize it.

I've also submitted some suggestions to the core, since the only thing I'm still missing is the compose box, the rest I've built into my fork.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/27102
https://help.mementomori.social/mementomori.social/instance-features
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-social-latest-update-built-in-translate-and-themes/

#BirdUI #MastodonBirdUI #MastoAdmin

@caterpillar Thanks! It's used by a few hundred instances now, most notably Vivaldi's.

After leaving Twitter, I just wanted to bring back that 2019 feel. Some UI and UX patterns have already been proven to work, and it's great (unlike Twitter was) Mastodon is open source so I can customize it.

I've also submitted some suggestions to the core, since the only thing I'm still missing is the compose box, the rest I've built into my fork.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/27102
https://help.mementomori.social/mementomori.social/instance-features
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-social-latest-update-built-in-translate-and-themes/

#BirdUI #MastodonBirdUI #MastoAdmin

Have any Mastodon admins running Debian 12 upgraded their (Mastodon) servers to Debian 13 and did you have any issues?

I've noticed that the official documentation now recommends running Mastodon on Debian 13 so it should, theoretically, be OK to upgrade from 12 but it would be good to hear if this has been successful for somebody else 🙂

#mastoadmin

If you're using the nightly or alpha version of Mastodon (from the main Git branch), the only functional Mastodon Bird UI version is under the branch dev-build-system-css-theme-tokens. There's no release or release candidate yet. While the modularization work is still in progress, the theme is already functional and much lighter thanks to the new build system.

https://github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui/tree/dev-build-system-css-theme-tokens

#MastodonBirdUI #MastoAdmin #BirdUI

Dear fellow #MastoAdmin

Half a year ago we got a new option in our admin settings under Discovery: "Allow external sites to see your Mastodon server as a traffic source".

This setting is off by default, but you might want to enable it on your server. It turns out that some of those favorite content creators we all know and like might have the opinion that Mastodon is completely and utterly dead since visits from us simply do not show up in their statistics otherwise.

This recently happened with a well known and much appreciated author in Sweden, who compared the number of visits from Bluesky (5486) with Mastodon (73). Not surprisingly, it turned out that referrals were set to off on the bigger Swedish instances.

If you have a very small instance there could be valid privacy concerns with enabling this, but otherwise it might be something we need to do to simply show that we exist and that there are a lot of active users appreciating those content creators here.

Okay, I think #Universeodon should now be up, running and stable. There were a couple of bits I missed when I had deployed everything ready for the DB migration so we ran into some issues where we just got crushed with load and the server couldn't handle it properly.

It has flagged some other issues that I wasn't expecting when it comes to capacity and load but those are things I should be able to solve in due course and as part of moving MastodonAppUK over.

#MastoAdmin