That was slightly more drama updating to Mastodon v4.5.0 than I wanted.

The OS restarted while the database migration was in progress so I had to restore the database from backups.

Except this took some time because of the size of the database and the fact that the backup software I have for […]

So now according to Cloudflare, Perplexity will attempt to bypass attempts to block it from accessing websites. If people don’t want AI on their website, they don’t want AI on their website […]

Looks like I have this to investigate now because this a warning is now appearing on my admin dashboard. Whatever the problem is seems to affect Elasticsearch 7.17.23 and Mastodon 4.4.2 , because this never appeared on Mastodon 4.3.x and the suggested command […]

[Original post on birdbox.party]

Since the UK and to an extant the EU governments like age verification so much and asking for photo ID from people for using the internet, how long until the provider that handles these verifications has a data breach?

Of course, the politicians will be fine, they probably all have their VPN […]

Well there goes OVH again, even their own website is down for everyone in Europe.

I would probably consider posting a screenshot of it, except my Mastodon instance is hosted in Europe and the media storage is hosted at OVH so that is clearly not going to work.

#ovh #ovhcloud

Great, just what I needed. Apparently even Amazon now have a web crawler which collects data to do what they describe as "improve our services, such as enabling Alexa to more accurately answer questions for customers".

It also looks like they use crawled data […]

[Original post on birdbox.party]

So I decided to change the max length of posts on this Mastodon instance to 1,500 characters.

I didn't actually have to do as much as most guides for this suggest, it seems since Mastodon v4.3.0 you no longer need to edit compose_form.jsx for the web UI to work

#mastoadmin

Well that should give me some time to look the Online Safety Act.

I basically configured my CDN provider to block any UK IP addresses, although I did make a few exceptions to try and limit how much federation is broken while still completely preventing any "user content" from being shown.

Something is going on with my object storage at #ovh, my server is timing out connections to it so I checked the OVH website and apparently I "have not created an Object Storage service yet"

We posted our monthly engineering update, Trunk & Tidbits - a bit lighter than usual, but there is still plenty going on. We are about to end support for version 4.1.x, so upgrade now! Also, check out our picks from around the community 👍🏻 […]

@newyorktimes's veteran tech reporter John Markoff interviewed some of #teamfediverse including @Gargron, @reckless1280 and our CEO @mike for a feature on the rise of decentralized social media. “It goes back to the original principles where the internet started out as decentralized,” Eugen […]

For anyone that hasn't seen it yet you can add the Misskey/Sharkey instance at baise-moi.top to your #fediblock list, it is yet another source of map content and potential CSAM

#fediadmin #mastoadmin

So for the purposes of #mastoadmin I decided I had enough with backing up database dumps with scripts, which I was only ever planning on using temporarily anyway because it is likely a lot of writes will be missed.

Now doing #postgresql backups with https://pgbackrest.org/ and as a bonus, each […]

At least my media storage provider is working again, they haven't been able to fix some problem with their network all day and that seems to have been going down every 15 minutes

Well that is unfortunate. I might have to shutdown my Mastodon instance sometime around March because I just so happen to be based in the UK and there is now the UK Online Safety Act, and it is simply too broad to be able to comply with the requirements for moderation and reporting as things […]