Locus of Points @locus@schelling.pt
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- CONVERGE
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- pee_zombie
Admin
CONVERGE, THIS
administrator of schelling.pt
Joined Jan 2021
⚠️ ADMIN POST ⚠️
apologies for the downtime! seems I'd missed the domain expiration emails 🤦♂️ I've now renewed the domain for a few years, should be working again. lmk if there are any lingering issues!
i've identified the issue as being caused by an overwhelmed DB and have upsized it slightly, should hold us off for a while until i get better monitoring in place. apologies for the downtime!
⚠️ ADMIN POST ⚠️
am aware there's a performance issue currently, am looking into it. thank u for ur patience
Locus of Points
boosted
If you are new to Mastodon and coming from the Twitter tide, here’s a few amazing Mastodon features that are NOT ON TWITTER. Enjoy! 🐘
1. Content Warnings CW ⚠️
It allows you to display a warning but hides the content of your post. Here’s a short guide I wrote about it: https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/109282181601490676
2. Slow Mode 😌
In Preferences > Appearance, you can select the option “Slow mode” to hide automatic feed updates. You will then have to click at the top of the timelines to see new posts (ex: “10 new items”).
3. Custom Emojis 
When you write a post (called a toot here), you can select emojis that are custom to your server (called an instance here). In the toot field, click on the 😂 button in the upper right corner to see what’s available there. Some are really neat! 
4. Mastodon is different 
There is no suggestion algorithms here, no promotion, no ads. This is a community. You can be more of your true complex and unique self. Engage with others genuinely. Follow others you like no matter their followers count. Describe yourself and what interests you in your bio, you are not as limited by characters count here.
Be yourself. Leave the toxicity out, it is not valued here. Respect others. Be a kind human. Share what you love. Make friends 
I'm still thinking about longer term sustainability, and how that might mean that to justify the time allocation might make sense to make this a paid instance (nothing crazy, with tiers ofc) but I recognize it's pretty hard to convince people to pay for a previously free service
any thoughts?
anyway so I've fixed all these and have upgraded to latest masto (v3.5.3), which took about as much effort as I expected (had to upgrade one step at a time to account for migrations)
the server is still very much a pet, in the sense that it's manually groomed and cared for, nothing is version controlled nor managed thru IaC. this pains me greatly
hopefully this time around I'll make it more of a priority to manage it better
- the server was self-DDoSing bc the streaming API component was bootlooping as the node binary somehow became owned by root and hence inaccessible to the service user, so requests would fallback to the much less efficient REST api
- the version of masto i was on has a known issue where it is currently impossible to install with ANY version of node, bc some very specific dep with a binary module depends on a specific version of something which is no longer available online
if anyone is curious as to what was wrong, i've found and fixed the following issues:
- main nginx route had misconfigured TLS to use the wrong cert path, so even tho certbot was renewing, the new cert wasnt getting used
- media nginx route's TLS cert was configured properly, but was expired bc the cronjob broke
!! ADMIN POST !!
apologies for the long maintenance hiatus
I have resolved the main issues and have upgraded to latest Mastodon version
should be good for a bit; please reach out with any concerns
ADMIN POST:
apologies for the outage, we should be back now! these should be minimized soon as I'm working on setting up monitoring/alerting
!! ADMIN POST !!
seems like we haven't had images load for a bit over a week; apologies for taking so long to address this. the cause was that the SSL cert for the object storage domain (files schelling.pt) had expired, as I had forgotten to renew it at the same time as the primary cert for the root domain. I've resolved the issue & will try to find time to automate the cert renewal so that we don't face this issue again
major thanks to @WomanCorn and @TetraspaceGrouping for pointing this out!
!! ADMIN POST !!
once again, apologies for the downtime! I am investigating the root cause, and setting up monitoring/alerting will be my highest priority this weekend, in order to minimize the risk of this recurring. thank you for your patience and for bearing with our growing pains!
!! ADMIN POST !!
apologies for the recent downtime! I'm still looking into what happened and will report back with findings. for the time being, we are back up.
!! ADMIN POST !!
its been a bit over a week since we've started hanging out here, here are some stats on what's happened so far
91 total users
23 new users this week
61 users active this week
2.63k interactions this week
lmk if y'all would like to see more/less of this sort of thing, or any other kind of info!
!! ADMIN POST !!
it has been brought to my attention that within the last few days our federated timeline has gotten rather... interesting. while no one HAS to see these posts, it can be suboptimal when there is a low signal-to-noise ratio. in the interests of good content, is there appetite for silencing some of the worst offenders? Silencing means that users from those servers can still be followed, but other posts won't show up in the timeline. open to suggestions!
!! ADMIN POST !!
the SSL issue has been resolved and images should be working now! please let me know if this is not the case, and generally if anything isn't working!
!! ADMIN POST !!
we may experience momentary downtime (<5 mins) within the next half hour as I fix our SSL/media issues; working images incoming!
Locus of Points
boosted
hey there all y'all, and welcome to schelling.pt! I appreciate you joining me in this experiment and hope we succeed in building a nice lil community here. one thing that may help is linking back to your Twitter on your profile, like I did in the attached pic; totally optional, but may help us get our bearings. I'm still working out some of the kinks in the setup and would appreciate if you report any issues to me or @locus ! ty and have fun
admin announcement: there seems to be an issue with our media host's SSL cert causing images to not load; this will be resolved this weekend
- ADMIN
- YES
- CONVERGE
- THIS
- AKA
- pee_zombie
Admin
CONVERGE, THIS
administrator of schelling.pt
Joined Jan 2021
