#Admin#Indiewebsocial - as we mentioned yestersay - our server today is supporting #VoteEarlyDay and encourages all US citizens that make this your social home to get registered and VOTE today!

Make it happen. You can get more info by following @voteearlyday or by going here: https://voteearlyday.org/vote/

We hope every #FediAdmin and #Mastoadmin join us in sending this non-partisan message to their users today!

#FederateTheVote

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 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

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: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/32673#issuecomment-2443737948
#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

#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
https://about.iftas.org/first-50/

📢 As of today we have scanned over 20,000 images and videos to monitor and mitigate potential CSAM.

If you'd like to be on the list as we open up to more servers, please register your interest using this link (don't click the preview card, it won't work...)

https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/SXiobzcxTRrpVsWMJDh+h+loLkAmsTQ-8-egNm+ihlo/

Registering helps us demonstrate need in our efforts to obtain funding for this expensive service - currently costing us ~$5,000 / month.

(Donations are helpful too!)

#MastoAdmin#FediAdmin

#Admin#IndiewebSocial

While I am *personally* advocating for #KamalaHarris for US President - this *server* is strictly non-political for US or other countries elections - other than being broadly pro-democracy.

But that said: we ARE supporting at a server #VoteEarlyDay this October 29th. 🗳️

And will be amplifying the @voteearlyday account here, and encourage all my #FediAdmin and #mastoadmin colleuges to do the same at their server levels.

https://mastodon.social/@voteearlyday/113379953087293442

We just released Mastodon 4.3.1!

It contains some bug fixes and a few small features, like (optional) grouping of follow notifications and improvements the fediverse:creator setup instructions.

Upgrading requires re-compiling frontend assets (if not using Docker), instructions are in the release notes : https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.3.1

#mastodev #mastoadmin

💙 If you operate a federated instance, have benefitted from our activities, and would like to show your support for IFTAS publicly, we humbly ask you to become a Supporting Instance: https://about.iftas.org/our-sponsors/

Your participation helps us demonstrate strong community backing to our sponsors and stakeholders. Add your server today:

➡️ https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/JfYu0zQZ3T7qbjb0YWF3fi8uw2ixXF9rwnJRvxLiAkI/

#FediAdmin#MastoAdmin#TogetherStronger

After another spam wave, we're so grateful for @iftas

Their quick action prevented a repeat of the spam wave earlier in the year and things seem to be under control.

Thankfully, our complex signup process held up and the spam accounts involved in this attack weren't able to set-up on our instance! 💪

You can support IFTAS and the work they do to prevent & slow attacks like this here: https://about.iftas.org/donate/

#Spam#FediAdmin#MastoAdmin#Moderation

We released Mastodon 4.3 today, packed with a lot of awesome features: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/

I want to thank @Claire, @Gargron, @dave for their hard work on the code, as well as @samhenrigold for the design. Also a lot of thanks to our regular contributors, including @matt and @thisismissem

Now let's focus on 4.4! We have a lot of exiting things to work on, we will do our best to release it before September 2025 😅

#mastodev #mastoadmin

I really think there needs to be an implemention of shared blocklisting where we can federate blocks from sources we choose. Apparently Bluesky has some features related to this, and I think it needs to be revisited to help for some of these spam attacks. This is the second wave of spam attacks. It's still small, but it may amplify and become as problematic as a few months ago.

#mastodon#Fediverse#Fediblockmeta #spam #mastoadmin #serveradmin#Infosec #cybersecurity

Roughly half the servers used in today's spam wave have already responded to our community outreach and modified their registration settings, deleted the spam accounts and posts, and hopefully will be better prepared for similar events in the future.

Thank you to our community for spotting this, helping write the admin alerts in various languages, contacting the affected servers, and updating our worksheet!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13sskOdKraYo2hSMK353Ijm0_K8WCp-JHs6cyruffedA/

#FediAdmin#MastoAdmin #spam @sw_isac