Love the lack of propper media cache tooling on mastodon.

No way to clear whatever just pushed over 4GB of media across the fediverse

Mastodon admins currently getting slammed by Earth's least creative spammer really shows how awesome #mastoadmins are if you haven't seen this spam yet.

But bruh we need more spam fighting tools. This spammer is literally sending identical DMs to probably thousands of users and we don't have a stock tool that allows us to auto block/flag it.

I've been experimenting with enabling translation on my instance and since I've seen zero documentation about how to configure LibreTranslate with a purchased api key, I'm going to share my findings here.

Pretty much every guide out there for enabling translation on a Mastodon instance using LibreTranslate assumes that you are going to be setting up the LibreTranslate server yourself. That's admirable, but translation is pretty resource-intensive. When I tested this on my instance, it was taking about 2 seconds to translate a post, and even longer for longer posts. Plus there were some languages that weren't working at all. That was probably on me for not setting up the language packs correctly. Maybe I'll give it another try, but somewhere in the middle of wrestling with the translation server, I realized that I'm here to run a Mastodon instance, not a LibreTranslate instance, so I went and purchased an api key from LibreTranslate for their lower tier of $29 a month (good for 80 translations per minute). Based on the average donations we get each month, that seemed a reasonable cost that we could afford. The trouble was, configuring the instance to use the api key didn't seem to be working at all.

Now if you go to https://libretranslate.com it lets you play around with the api and shows what the post request and the subsequent response looks like. In the post request and in the api documentation, the endpoint for the translation service is:

https://libretranslate.com/translate

but if you set LIBRE_TRANSLATE_ENDPOINT to that value in your .env.production file, it won't work. After a bunch of googling and experimentation, I finally went and looked at the pull request for this feature on GitHub. And that's where I saw that in the code for the post request it takes the configured LIBRE_TRANSLATE_ENDPOINT value and then adds the "/translate" at the end of it.

Even though I was sure I had tried this before, I set LIBRE_TRANSLATE_ENDPOINT to:

https://libretranslate.com

Without the "/translate" on the end. I restarted the web service and cleared the cache and it started working perfectly.

It'd be nice if any of this was actually documented somewhere.

Any #mastoadmins have issues upgrading from 4.3.2 to 4.3.3? I seem to be missing a bunch of gems. Followed the usual steps.

Hey #mastoAdmins

Is there an easy way to force #mastodon to to be more aggressive in backfilling comments? One of my least favourite aspects of running indie is having to open posts in the browser to see all the comments.

Like, if someone I don't follow posts, I can see a few comments. When I open in browser, I can see many more - including some from my mutuals (that did not display on my instance).

Has anyone done an install of Mastodon built on top of AAPanel for Nginx, Redis and Postgresql management? Thinking of migrating servers and looking to make some of the process easier.

Any #mastoAdmins encounter 403 errors with #libretranslate, running both on same server (not using an API key)

LT web works, and I can make API requests from curl, but #mastodon is throwing a 403.

I'm seeing a lot of HTTP response code 429 (Too Many Requests) on the media_proxy endpoint, which I guess is a known issue but seems silly none-the-less.

#MastoAdmins's can easily help the #Tor network by installing the Tor daemon on the linux server and configuring their web server to be a #WebTunnel bridge

disobey.net does it (https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/7E12D6CACBA1051FD23A48482E091257CD4701BC), you can too!

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/tor-needs-200-new-webtunnel-bridges-to-fight-censorship/

"Hiding in plain sight: Introducing WebTunnel"

https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-webtunnel-evading-censorship-by-hiding-in-plain-sight/

That's a new one. Any thoughts?

(Mp4 upload)

Question for #MastoAdmins. I just did the upgrade to 4.3.0 and everything seems to be working except for notifications. I ran the pre and post deployment database migrations, and the old notifications got pulled over, but no new notifications are showing up. Anyone else have this problem?

Editing this because I was able to resolve this issue by rebooting the web server. I'll leave this post up in case anyone else has this problem.

Aside from the time I spend researching, preparing, and then delivering keynotes on stages, I geek out with a lot of tech. I think it's how I relax LOL.

Just finished a complex project today that had me moving all of my servers - my main website, Sendy mailing list, Ghost publishing platform, and a family and friends server with WordPress sites - away from Vultr and over to Hetzner to cut cost in 1/2. As part of this, I implemented CloudPanel on 3 of them to move away from Runcloud, to cut out another $200 a year. Really happy with CloudPanel.

One last project is to migrate this Mastodon instance - futurist.info - off of Vultr onto a lower cost/bigger drive Hetzner instance. I'm struggling with the official docs as found here:

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/

because it fails on a few key steps.

Does anyone have any docs on this process that are accurate and up to date?

Bonus: Has anyone implemented Mastodon on top of a CloudPanel infrastructure?

It's a bit tempting to give Mastodon Glitch a try.

- https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs
- https://github.com/glitch-soc/mastodon

Seems like switching back and forth between Glitch and regular Mastodon should be pretty seamless.

Curious to hear about other people's experience, things to watch out for.

Hey #MastoAdmins!
We've recently seen a fairly large uptick in racist/troll accounts and instances surfacing over the last week or so (thankfully, away from here for now). We're interested in sharing work with others, and we've figured a shared/maintained block list of these would help reduce duplicate work. We're aware of the @oliphant block lists, but we're curious if anyone's also setting up a "US Election Gaming” list as well.

cc @EverydayMoggie @Ingurido @neuralgraffiti @seb

If this is helpful to anyone, I recently made a tool that lets you copy blocklists from Mastodon servers that publicly share this information in a format that can be imported to your own server, if you're an admin.

A use case for this would be: I trust the admin of XYZ.social, l want to block all the same servers they're blocking.

https://stefanbohacek.com/project/mastodon-domain-block-exporter-script/

I wrote a little Python script that downloads domain blocks from a specified Mastodon server and saves them as a CSV file that can be imported to your own server. In case this is something you need.

https://github.com/stefanbohacek/mastodon-domain-block-exporter-script

I’ve just released v7.1.0 of FediFetcher. This is an important release that will significantly improve resource usage and running time of FediFetcher, as well as help our users be good citizens of the fediverse.

I encourage you all to update to the latest version asap.

For full details including update instructions visit the release page:

https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher/releases/tag/v7.1.1

(Edited to point link to 7.1.1 - this is a bug fix, and you should update to 7.1.1 rather than 7.1.0 if you can.)

I love randomly checking my mastodon monitoring and someone federating 4GB of data in 10 minutes.

Who was it? Who knows!
Does masto have tools to find out? Hell no.
Is there a way to clear that data without completely killing the media cache? Haha. no.