Fedi admins, please switch off instant signups! 🙏

You can do this at Preferences > Administration > Server Settings > Registrations > Who Can Sign Up, change to "approval required for signup", tick box marked "require a reason", save changes.

If you allow instant signups, you are opening your server to spammers, causing headaches for hundreds of other servers who all have to block your spammers. The latest wave of spam is *all* on servers that have instant signups!

#FediAdmin #MastoAdmin

@mojala @neo There's been endless discussions about that amongst developers. It's not that simple. We used to have the automatic recognition in v3 or something, but they removed it because it was not reliable.

github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i…

#MastoAdmin #Mastodon

Re-introduce automatic language detection for posts · Issue #25568 · mastodon/mastodon

Pitch Many users (even bots!) don't correctly set the language tag when posting. This can result in timelines containing very frequent unreadable posts for users not speaking the language, which is...

^GitHub

Is there any way, in Mastodon, to automatically suspend an account if they post a specific link?

#mastodon #MastoAdmin #spam

I suspended @pquvx@mstdn.jp for spam DMs.

#mastoadmin

I've suspended federate.net for continuous spamming.

#mastoadmin #fediblock

I love that the first command on the Mastodon "Using the admin CLI" documentation page is the ultimate kaboom command.

#mastodon #mastoadmin

Speaking of #MastoAdmin duties that I'm working on right now, I'm also setting up regular cleanup for my instance.

ultramookie.com/2024/03/mastod…

#mastodon #fediverse

Keeping Mastodon Tidy

Admin’s gotta vacuum sometimes to make things clean.

^{Steve Mookie Kong (ultramookie)}

Reposting my Cheap Bastard's Guide to Monitoring Mastodon since I just launched my own Mastodon instance again and set this stuff up again.

ultramookie.com/2023/03/monito…

#mastodon #mastoadmin #fediverse

Monitoring Basics... On the Cheap

How Mookie does monitoring…

^{Steve Mookie Kong (ultramookie)}

Interesting. Hackers are mistaking Mastodon user profile account addresses for email addresses and sending fake roundcube phishing emails to the few accounts I have on my self-hosted instance in hopes of getting credentials.

"Roundcube Found Several Undelivered Messages"

I only received it because my domain has catch-all email turned on that will forward any email for email accounts that don't exist to a special email address.

The emails come from "Restoredesk.oldfriends.live <info@ecmtincinc.live>", pass spf and ip 79.141.160.47. Link below, which is Dropbox owned "DocSendDotCom"

Be careful if you host your own instance and have catch-all email setup and this slips past your little grey cells.

#Infosec #Spam #Phishing #Spoofing #MastoAdmin

If you run a Mastodon server you probably already know about some of the existing tools for collectively managed domain blocks.

As an alternative, I created a simple Python script that lets you copy public domain blocks from servers you trust for an easy import.

stefanbohacek.com/project/mast…

Keeping your community safe should be a number one priority!

#fediverse #FediAdmin #mastodon #MastoAdmin #DomainBlocks #safety #community #python #opensource

Pinned posts organizer

A simple script for exporting a trusted Mastodon server's domain block list.

^{Stefan Bohacek (stefanbohacek.com)}

It would be great to have the mobile nav more compact again. Its height feels too much on smaller phones.

In the original UI the header is way too cramped. In Mastodon Bird UI and Tangerine the screen estate is designed to be more well used, but lately the header hack no longer works, because the "tab wrapper" is inside the feed and cannot be shifted on top of the top bar "ui header" no more.

Any ideas @nileane / @renchap? Before sending an issue or PR request I'd like some thoughts on this.

The current version I'm running is the latest nightly.

#MastoAdmin #UI #MastodonBirdUI #BirdUI #CSS #HTML

Mastodon Bird UI v2.0.6rc for nightly versions has been released. We needed to move back to 2 level mobile nav, because it is no longer possible to use the hack after a slight HTML change.

Nightly changelog: github.com/ronilaukkarinen/mas…

#BirdUI #MastodonBirdUI #MastoAdmin

Release 2.0.6rc · ronilaukkarinen/mastodon-bird-ui

2.0.6rc: 2024-11-10 💀 Note about compatibility: This version will not support Mastodon versions before 4.4.0-alpha.1-2024-11-09. This version supports versions after 1e71c4e Fix issues with the ...

^GitHub

After setting up the backup buckets at Contabo, the migration was done via flexify.io. You get a 20 USD balance, which was sufficient to migrate all the backup data from Linode to Contabo.

This tool is super convenient. Just define source and target and press Go. There are also advanced options in case you need it.

The services uses DigitalOcean droplets which are deployed on-the-fly. The through is very high (the main benefit compared to using s3cmd etc. Can highly recommend.

2/

#MastoAdmin #MountainsAdmin

On the UpCloud site there was no documentation what fair-use traffic meant in case you just use object storage. Asking via chat proved to be very good. Within minutes an actual person (no bot!!) replied and gave me the information I needed (it appears that 10 TB per month is considered fair-use, we use approx 1 TB so all good). Such a good support service of UpCloud.

I'm normally not so into referral programs, but after this good experience, let's give it a go. Maybe it is useful for someone.

"For every new user who signs up using your referral code and makes at least two successful one-time payments, you will receive €50 worth of free credits after 28 days have passed since their first payment. Every new user also receives a bonus worth of €25 credits when signing up through the referral program."

upcloud.com/signup/?promo=T6J9…

Every 250 GB object storage costs €5, so that would give new customers 5 months of free storage.

3/3

#MastoAdmin #MountainsAdmin

Has anyone done a thing like Tweetback but for #Mastodon? It’d be cool to have a static archive of my old server, at least the toots, rather than the whole thing disappearing? #MastoAdmin #11ty

github.com/tweetback/tweetback

GitHub - tweetback/tweetback: Take ownership of your Twitter data and get your tweets back

Take ownership of your Twitter data and get your tweets back - tweetback/tweetback

^GitHub

Do you want to restart delivery to instances that had some technical difficulties a while ago but are now back online?

Don't feel like trawling through 50+ pages of dead domains and testing them all manually?

I have a script for you: codeberg.org/GunChleoc/mastodo…

It uses cURL to check if the domain is still reachable and also checks if it has any account relationships, then either purges it or adds it to a list for manual action via the Moderation UI.

#MastoAdmin

The work on the streaming server was largely done in 2023, in honour of @nova, after she's shown on a stream that something really weird was up with streaming.

Turned out it was issues I'd discovered in 2018 but hadn't had time to fix.

So I spent a tonne of my own time (I wasn't yet paid as much by the community) to improve the streaming server significantly.

This refactoring is still ongoing, but I'm balancing it with other work, like FIRES and improving the moderation UI.

#mastoadmin

In the future we'll hopefully be adding OpenTelemetry traces to streaming and also further improving performance by moving database queries that don't change often out of the message sending loop.

This will consume a bit more memory (since we'll cache that data in memory) but it'll reduce load on the database.

We're actually looking for help with OTel: github.com/mastodon/mastodon/i…
#mastoadmin

OpenTelemetry support for Streaming · Issue #32673 · mastodon/mastodon

Pitch This is a placeholder ticket for all the bits that are needed for doing OTEL for streaming, which currently only exposes Prometheus metrics. We will get semi-far with auto instrumentation on ...

^GitHub

e.g., we'd receive one JSON message from redis, and then parse it N times to send it to N clients, when we should parsed once. The extra parsing created millions of additional objects that all needed to be garbage collected by Node.js's memory

Here's what event loop lag and GC look like on another instance I had data from:

#mastoadmin

So if you're reading anything old about setting STREAMING_CLUSTER_NUM high for "performance":

a) this does nothing anymore, we removed clustering because it's actually more efficient to let nginx do the load balancing.

b) it often came about from people seeing the ... in the UI, that was because we had some code in the streaming server that regularly caused huge GC pauses causing streaming to pause.

#mastoadmin

Generally I'd aim closer to ~2k concurrent per pod as a maximum.

That way a pod dying is taking out 1/5th the connections, instead of 1/3rd the connections, because handling those reconnections is the most expensive part.

If you're looking at the metrics that streaming exposes and constantly seeing only <1000 concurrent connections, you probably only need a single instance, maybe two for failover.

#mastoadmin

So remember how I was ranting about everyone dramatically over provisioning the Mastodon's streaming server?

Well, for an idea of how well it scales, now we've fixed some really poorly performing code, mastodon.social runs 3 instances of the streaming server supporting ~10k concurrent connections

Yeah, ~3k connections per pod is a little high, but it manages to handle it. Event loop lag & GC lag may be higher with that number of concurrents.

#mastoadmin

Okay, so I realized I might have to clear away some cache. My s3 bucket for our mastodon instance is around 2 TB.

So I searched a bit and found out I can run something like:

tootctl media remove
tootctl preview_cards

This should probably clear up quite a bit.

I can of course use the --days switch and do:

tootctl media remove --days 365

just to be sure I won't mess thing up too much :)

Any other admins that can give me some feedback?

ricard.dev/improving-mastodons…

#fediadmin #mastoadmin

Improving Mastodon's disk usage - Ricard Torres dev

Mastodon's built-in CLI gives you the availability to clean attachments and previews from remote accounts, purging the disk cache. This is fantastic and

^{Ricard Torres (Ricard Torres dev)}

How do I add more of these "profile metadata" fields in my Mastodon profile? (backend editing) is it possible in vanilla Mastodon? not glitch

EDIT Yes! it is! i got it. blog post to follow for documentation's sake.

#mastoadmin

This was a super easy change. I've blogged about it to be clear:

"Add more profile metadata fields to Mastodon."

yawnbox.is/blog/add-more-profi…

#MastoAdmin

#Admin #IndiewebSocial

If you care about a safe fediverse, I highly reocomend that you give to @iftas - our server has, and I am an advisor there.

The value to IFTAS against spam, organized harassment, and other threats to ourusers cannot be overstated, it is one of the most optimistic signs of the fediverse maturing I've seen. Give at the link below:

#FediAdmin #MastoAdmin cc: @fediversenews
about.iftas.org/first-50/

The IFTAS First 50

At Independent Federated Trust & Safety, we believe in the power of community. This page is dedicated to celebrating the commitment and vital role our early supporters have played in our journe…

^IFTAS