Ryan Wild

And that's us updated, #MastodonAppUK is now running Mastodon 4.6. I do need to update our fork for the latest bug patches but that will probably be a weekend job. You may need to refresh your page.

I'm hoping to have some time this week to get our custom tweaks to Mastodon applied to the new 4.6 release over the course of this week with the goal of hopefully getting it deployed to the instances over the weekend. I'm fortunately pretty busy with project work (Which is what pays my bills!) so time is a bit of a premium for me right now hence the delay of it being this weekend that I will hopefully be able to apply the updates themselves. #MastodonAppUK #Universeodon

This evening I'm planning to update #MastodonAppUK to a newer Mastodon version. Due to it being a major upgrade there will be a short downtime while we perform the relevant steps to get us fully up to date but I'm hoping it should be no more than a couple of mins for us to get up to date. I do also need to give Universeodon a bump in versions as there have been some bugfixes released that we aren't currently running so will hopefully get those applied to both later in the week. Status page - https://status.atlas-media.co.uk/schedules/37

Some good news, I've managed to get the Mastodon fork we use for #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon now updated for 4.6. I'm going to try updating #Universeodon fairly shortly so there might be a couple of blips while I perform DB migrations and get everything up and running there. Once I'm happy that Universeodon is working as expected and given it a couple of days for the dust to settle I'll get #MastodonAppUK also upgraded to the same version.

Apologies to those that have had to wait longer than usual for accounts to be approved here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've had a large spike in spam accounts with increasingly legitimate looking reasons for joining and a wider range of domains and IPs than usual. It's taking a lot more work than normal to work out which accounts appear to be legitimate and which ones are bots / bad actors.

Think I've found my new favourite spot to eat lunch. So quiet so peaceful and such a lovely view. #Scotland #Nature #GoodView

My apologies to the folks on #Universeodon who were impacted by an outage this afternoon, the issue did self resolve before I had a chance to look into it but it looks like it's due to an ongoing memory issue with the SideKiq server (Content processing) which caused a spike in CPU and memory pressure on one of our underlying servers. I'm doing some work quickly now to get it back to full health.

I should also say, there's a whole load of this work being done as groundwork to be able to offer a solid UK sovereign managed hosting platform which eventually I want to then move the two Mastodon instances, the GTS instance to and then be able to start expanding into having a PeerTube and other fedi sites up and running. I'm keen that we have all the good stuff like S3 and DNS working properly and in a good state and we've proven we can migrate the existing instances over though and a lot of that starts with things like these IPv6 VPS's being supported, eventually IPv4 VPS's being supported and proving out that more of the complex foundational infrastructure is going to do what I need / want it to do!

I've roughly doubled the memory allocation to the SideKiq / content processing server taking us from around 50GB (Which I think is what it was originally) up to about 110GB. That should give us plenty of headroom for the time being. I'm hoping I'll have some time of an evening later this week or if not at the weekend to build out a couple of new SideKiq nodes and scale down what's running on the current one so that at least that way if one does lock up it shouldn't lock everything up again. I do at some point want to re-build all of this in a nicer way anyway so it might be the starting point for that to be honest...

Just as a bit of an update for the folks here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon I haven't quite had the time I expected over the weekend to get the patched and customised version of Mastodon working with 4.6, I'm hoping to have some time later in the week however I am also currently pretty swamped with client work and have a fair bit of work travel coming up. The plus side to all of this is the client work is what pays my bills and allows me to continue to invest in more hardware, I'm still very keen to get a UK based S3 service operational (Subject to Storage and RAM costs) for us to migrate our media to as well as getting a secondary site with enough capacity to run some of the workload if we ever had an issue on our primary site. I'm hoping over the next couple of weeks to get us updated to the latest version of Mastodon and will share more as and when I've got useful info to share.

The #Universeodon instance is now updated to Mastodon 4.6. The good folks over at @MastodonEngineering@mastodon.social have done all the hard work of writing up what has changed so I'd encourage you to take a look here - https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/06/mastodon-4.6/ Assuming there's nothing that goes horribly wrong in the next day or two I'll also get #MastodonAppUK upgrades later this week.

Well this is absolutely horrifying for all sorts of reasons. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned-for-under-16s-in-landmark-government-move-to-givekids-their-childhood-back There's a lot of smarter people than I that can articulate why this is as terrible as it is but it's already proven to be entirely ineffective in Australia who did something similar and now gives another "Justification" for the invasive "ID Verification" (A giant target database of your government issued ID pictures more accurately for hackers to try to steal) checks...

Short interruption while I scrammed some excellent food for dinner. We continue with these cuties which were dwarf mongooses.

Tiny mouse!

@vmstan@vmst.io If you're open to having someone else take over the hosting and running of the site to keep it online past June 30th I'd be happy to help and keep the instance online.

Our view both from our cabin tonight and from our little walk earlier. Much much longer walk planned tomorrow and just enjoying being in some peace and quiet. #Scotland #holiday #BankHoliday

Ring tailed lemurs up next. Yet another animal we've spotted having a snack. Starting to wonder if zoo life is the best life... Could do with someone just feeding me snacks all day. I wouldn't get anything done but wouldn't it be nice.

Mix and match enclosure up next but featuring the one, the only, capybara!

Followed by even more fishy boys.

Take two on the penguins. It's fine we found even more anyway.

Getting the IPv6 VPS's on the site is something I'm really keen for though I might also wait until the Mikrotik work is done so I don't need to do a big outage to replace the core networking gear just after folks start to use it which would be very not ideal! I also at some point soon need to finish doing the prep work to get @atlasmediagroup@mastodonapp.uk through a Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus audit and certification as it seems that's going to block me being able to grow the business and win more work with a lot of the customers that I currently do some independent consulting for but that's again a whole load of work! But none of that is a tonight problem, right now it's time for a shower (Yay heatwave in the UK) and bed and fingers crossed my new EV charger does what I think it's set to do through my HomeAssistant and charges my car a bit overnight (And bigger fingers crossed the Agile Octopus rates are better over the weekend!)

After a load of delays at French passport control we are finally on le shuttle and on our way across the channel to France. @PrinceMumbles@mastodonapp.uk and I had planned to get the eurostar but there was major disruption due to a fire or something earlier in the week so I'm driving now instead.

And apologies to the folks here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - This has broken a lot of follower / following relationships which I know is never ideal. This is a lot of the reason I've been reluctant up until now to suspend the instance but the amount of reports we keep getting for it and the fact it's running a very old version of Mastodon with no active admin account since Feb 2023 means I don't see a sensible way to stay federated now.

Then we got to see these much calmer and more relaxed animals having their lunch and an afternoon nap.

Goat! After lunch sunbathing. What a life.

We spied some "Sulawesi Crested Macaque's" (credit to @PrinceMumbles@mastodonapp.uk for his Google Fu in finding the specific name) Once they spotted us they were kind enough to pose for the camera, and then walked off as if we never existed.

Cheeky cocktail before dinner.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/116929144390213579 For folks on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - I'd love your input on if you'd like me to enable this functionality. Our costs per e-mail is pretty small so I'm not super concerned currently about the cost of enabling this.

We're having some issues with #Universeodon at the moment - Unfortunately it looks like all our SideKiq content processing nodes have crashed / become non responsive. As a result the site isn't currently federating properly. I'm currently on-site with clients and haven't got access to remote into our infrastructure ( annoying I know). I will take a look to get the federation properly working as soon as I can. Any posts / activities will federate out later and the local feeds are still working as expected. Incident link here - https://status.atlas-media.co.uk/incidents/ec047fd3-3060-4fbf-b6a2-9e558cf69258

And this absolute stunner who was playing hard to get and hiding from us for most of the time we were trying to spot them! Though they did turn out to be quite the poser for the camera!

Did someone say teenage mutant ninja turtles?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116528777956430298 Well... What could go wrong?

A quick snack with the Zebras enjoying a tasty lunch.

I'm currently on holiday with @PrinceMumbles@mastodonapp.uk and have been enjoying spending some time here in Scotland, though did entirely forget that Scotland unlike everywhere else in the UK does not in fact have Sunday trading laws so the shops are actually open "Normal times" today. While I don't know if I want to actually get rid of Sunday trading laws elsewhere (As having worked in retail knowing you at least get the Sunday late afternoon / evening off is nice) but it is weird being somewhere in the UK and seeing people leaving supermarkets at 7:30pm on a Sunday! #Scotland #SundayTrading #UKLaw

So this is fun. For the first time since setting up the contributions towards the cost of the server we've had a credit card dispute raised for "The cardholder claims the product or service was defective, damaged, or not as described." Because of Stripe fees their £3 contribution has now cost me over £20 in fees alone as well as the £3 they originally contributed. It's bad enough that the cost of maintaining the site and the infrastructure continue to rise and contributions continue to drop but disputes like this when there has been no contact or attempts at contact made just take the cake.

Next to the baby elephants, this cute baby bird. I have no idea what type it is. #birdsofmastodon I'm sure will know!

Has anyone got any recommendations for not super difficult to use / setup / manage linux patching solutions? I was looking at Landscape as most of the servers are Ubuntu but it turns out you need "Call us" pricing with Ubuntu Pro to get more than 10 servers installed (And spoiler, I have more than 10 servers just to run Mastodon stuff!). #Linux #Patching #Security #DevOPS

@mdione@en.osm.town @philcowans@universeodon.com Sorry I should have been more clear, I am aware I could make ansible work for this, but right now we don't use ansible and I'm very aware of the huge amount of limitations ansible as a stack has (And patch management isn't something it's designed to do). The goal here was not to need to spend a huge amount of time and energy making my own solution because it seems like the sort of problem a lot of smarter people would have already solved. The reality is I'd like in the future to get to the point where all our services are managed and provisioned by ansible, but that's a hell of a lot of work and isn't really the answer I'm hoping for when it comes to my "How do I automate patch management" or get anywhere close to some sort of centralised view on patch management across my servers.

@Gazimoff@gamepad.club Have you got an idea of what sort of hosting you're looking for (EG VPS / Managed Containers / similar)?

@timbray@cosocial.ca VaultWarden is pretty okay and works with all the Bitwarden apps / integrations though it means you self host it, I run it for sharing creds with others who support my Masto instances behind the scenes. Also would recommend Proton Pass which I use personally and has been solidly "As good as I'd expect" from a password manager for the last few years I've used it in anger.

@mrose@universeodon.com Yes, and they don't seem to be changing their view on who they support which is disappointing. In this particular case I've somewhat reached the "Lesser of the evils" view because there aren't a lot of good laptop alternatives out there that have the proven track record of keeping support and not making things super proprietary. If there was a similar company out there with a similar track record, I'd be giving them my future business but I don't yet know of such a company.

RE: https://toot.community/@support/116912681948668699 These statistics are the reason we moved to a model of requiring a reason and approval. There's a lot of great work happening behind the scenes to automate more of these spam detections and take automated action and I'm hopeful we will get to a much better place soon where we can seriously review re-opening signups to be public again but we didn't have capacity when you see 80% or so of the accounts being spammers / bots / bad actors in general.

@philcowans@universeodon.com So that's my other option, my reason for trying to avoid it is it won't highlight when I need to go reboot machines or anything like that. And I'll also need to go through and change how auth works as right now each server has unique creds which will be moderately difficult (IIRC) to map into ansible. But equally it might be the best way forward and just run the playbook on a cron.

@wild1145@fedimedi.com Test 2

@philthy@mastodonapp.uk As far as I was aware it should have been enabled and working. I'm currently away on my holidays so might not have a chance to take a proper look for a few days but will take a look for you when I can to check that nothing is broken on our end.

I've been using Cachet for our status page for a long time now but unfortunately it seems to keep getting abandoned and I don't have the skill (or the time) to try to fix the issues in the upstream version that keep causing glitches for us. Has anyone got any recommendations for good self hosted status page software like Cachet that doesn't depend on being populated by automated monitoring data / similar. I just want a way to post the status myself and show an overview of the various services. #software #opensource #sysadmin #mastoadmin