Where this has gained some degree of attention today for the #Universeodon (and by extension #MastodonAppUK folks)
I have made use, for a while now of the minimum block list provided by @oliphant - This list combines the public block lists of a number of mastodon instances including some that I personally have had previous issues with. However, the minimum list has proven to be almost always spot on when it comes to removing servers that are known to be problematic for a range of reasons.
A couple of weeks ago that list got imported here to Universeodon, and there were a small handful (5 maybe) servers that had some existing relationship which we severed as a result of the import, which was an intentional decision on my part.
The intention behind bringing the list in was to start to align our moderation with MastodonApp, but to also try to ensure we aren't reacting to reports constantly, and that we can prevent our community from having to see content that may be upsetting.
My apologies to the folks here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon where there have been delays with removing some of the spam sign-up accounts. I've been working to add a lot of new IP restrictions based on the accounts that are signing up as well as making sure we don't just catch the accounts that are suspended but also the other accounts that used the same custom e-mail domain or IP Address. It just takes a lot more time than the one click to ban the account.
There have been... disruptions here (#MastodonAppUK) over the last few days, so, in contrast to (and thoroughly mis-quoting) Billy Bragg, I don't want to change the world, but I am #LookingForANewInstance .
Does anyone have any suggestions? Must be European-ish, not too big, not too small (is there a goldilocks.social?!).
We are currently experiencing an unexpected outage on #MastodonAppUK due to the disk space issues we ran into yesterday. I'm working now to free-up space and resolve the fault.
Sorry about the extended #MastodonAppUK maintenance there. Unfortunately I had to nip out while I was waiting for the job to finish but we are now fully back online and have managed to tick off two very major maintenance tasks that had been on our to-do list for quite a while!
I will be taking the site offline on Jan 3rd between 09:00 and 13:00 UK Time to perform essential maintenance to our database server. This is one of a few pieces of database maintenance I need to get completed to make the site more maintainable and to make the upcoming Mastodon upgrade that bit easier.
Also as a reminder for the #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon users here, we have Elk running on both sites if you want something a little bit different when it comes to your website style.
I've disabled the full text search capability here on #MastodonAppUK which should stop the errors folks were seeing on the website / apps from displaying. I will look to re-deploy the stack required to run this after Christmas :)
Apologies for the blip there on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon it looks like we ran into some issues that should now be resolved.
I'm investigating into what caused it, the initial investigation would suggest there may have been some form of attack that partially bypassed our CDN layer causing the load balancer to crash but I am still investigating and will update once I know a bit more.
I plan to perform the first step in the upgrades to this instance at some point between Christmas and the end of the First week in Jan, i'm not yet 100% sure exactly when, but as I have a couple of weeks off I will (at some point) have half a day to a day that I can spend to get things here mostly up to date (Probably a minor patch or two behind as I need to also update my custom fork of Mastodon before I can update to the very latest).
In just a couple of hours (21:05 UK Time) #MastodonAppUK will hit it's 1 year anniversary, which honestly looking back is something I wasn't sure we'd make it to for a while.
We've had a wild journey with some huge scaling issues at the start, both being at the time one of the few sites on the #Mastodon website that accepted registrations, being on the BBC news and various radio interviews, we went from 1 or 2 users to over 1k overnight and went onto over 50k in the first week.
It's been almost a year on #MastodonAppUK and I've probably used it far more than I ever did the #BirdSite
Having said that, I still want to consolidate my online presence into a singular place, so considering a #SelfHosted#Wordpress with ActivityPub plugin, but I'm also open to other options. Preferably with a low learning-curve.
And there are so many options, I just don't want to spend forever and a day setting up. Any out off the shelf, out of the box self hosted options?
Anyone know when #mastodonappuk will support hiding accounts in #lists from your home timeline? I understand it's a 4.2.0 feature, and it's going to be super useful.
Just as a #Universeodon and #MastodonAppUK update - Things might be a bit slow from me in terms of doing updates / maintenance.
Nothings wrong / out of the ordinary, I've got a lot of work (including some freelance weekend work) as well as having to sort out a load of admin / paperwork for the legal entity that runs both sites. I'll be back to my usual active self in a couple of weeks :)
We are seeing an issue with our front end load balancer which is resulting in some traffic being refused and others taking longer to respond. I'm in the process of deploying a fix now, but it will mean both #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon will take a short outage while the server reboots with a larger capacity.
This will mean the MastodonAppUK and Universeodon sites will be at reduced capacity, MastodonAppUK will probably be offline for a small amount of time entirely and Universeodon's relay will be offline for a short amount of time.
I've got a bit of time I think tomorrow where I'm planning to look to fix the character limit over on #Universeodon and potentially then in the evening get #MastodonAppUK Updated to 4.2 :)
@wild1145 Hello 👋 Thank you for your hard work running #mastodonappuk . I'm having a problem logging in to the site, can someone help me with this, please?