Hi everyone, and welcome to The Union Place! This Mastodon instance is intended as a home for all #union members, friends, and allies, across the #fediverse.
We're just getting started, so pardon the dust and the lack of customization, I've got some feelers out for images, but welcome all input and feedback!
I've done this shitpost before but then that entire server was lost so might as well redo it
Pretty annoying federation bug in both Mastodon and Pleroma
There's a really big problem with how Mastodon and Pleroma handle servers disappearing for a while.
By default, both daemons will "pause" delivery to remote instances that they haven't seen or been able to deliver to in 7 days. When delivery is paused, even sending DMs to/from test users won't result in a request being sent out.
Delivery is unpaused when you hear from the other server.
See the problem?
If a fediverse server has connectivity issues for a little over 7 days, nobody it used to federate with will send it any messages until they hear from it. And that server won't send any messages to remote servers until it hears from them.
While Mastodon has a way to manually unpause delivery, there is NO indication to the end user that they need to contact an admin to make this happen. If you were to, for example, send a DM to a paused instance after it comes up, you won't get any sort of error saying that delivery is paused, but at the same time, no job will ever be made to deliver your message.
Pleroma does not appear to have a way to unpause delivery at all, meaning that if this happens between two pleroma instances, it's essentially a suspension that neither admin can lift, or even see.
This, by the way, does not fix itself if one of the servers becomes aware of the other again through things like boosts. It *must* be manually cleared by an administrator.
How many instances can you never talk to again, because you or them disappeared for a week?
Anyway, please boost, and maybe someone who works on either project will see this. Eugen actively refuses my reports.
100 Mastodon myths:
1. Mastodon is hard.
FALSE. It’s a "soft"ware. Not hardware.
2. You have to use Linux to post on Mastodon.
FALSE. FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also supported.
3. You need to learn to use the Vim editor before posting on Mastodon.
FALSE. There’s also an emacs plugin.
4. Mastodon is only for computer nerds.
FALSE. As you can see, we sometimes try to make jokes that everyone could understand.
I have @WomanCorn on fedi, and I'm in other places under other names, but I'm not sure about doxing myself for those links.
I am on the vibecamp discord, if you want to catch me there.
Check your Mastodon Postgres collation today: a bug story.
I spent three evenings investigating why my instance stopped updating notifications and statuses correctly. I figured out that statuses were not gone, but not ordered correctly. Like if something shaked them a bit, but not much, just a bit.
I was debugging goroutines, learning about Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier (ULID) which is the ID that is used in the ActivityPub protocol. No luck. This is how they look like btw:
01GHGAC5EHKSQQ0YRPXNWVZ7EJ
01GHGA78BHHQ8A3T6SFVYXAV4Y
These ULIDs are used as unique identifiers and because they are lexicographically sortable, Mastodon implementations take advantage of that and sort by this database column.
Now it might be clear, but jeeez I spent some time until I finally figured: I created my Postgres database on a system with cs_CZ.UTF-8 locale. Therefore my database was created with cs_CZ collation.
See, in Czech, we have one special character "CH" and Czech collation it goes between "H" and "I". That was the problem and this is the big lesson that I learned.
Always create SQL database for Mastodon instances with "neutral" (English, none or C) collation: C.UTF-8. In case of Postgres, what you need to do is:
create database xxx with locale C.UTF-8 template template0
To check your collate, on Postgres do:
SELECT datcollate AS collation FROM pg_database WHERE datname = current_database();
Czech is not the only language that might bring problems I suppose. Check your databases now! Boost it. Thanks! Have fun.
mastodon/stallman copypasta, complete edition
Risks to Mastodon with increasing popularity
Interesting comment on Hackernews regarding a possible scenario/long term risk should Mastodon threaten the corporate sphere of social media.
So *theoretically*, could I take my Twitter archive https://tweets.bmannconsulting.com/, and format it in a Mastodon compatible JSON import format, and just … import 15 years of tweets?
Anyone done this? Any code tools out there for this?