MSP Social Users @mspsocialusers@mspsocial.net

Hi! I've decided I'm going to try using this account for server-admin related announcements, so they don't make up such a big portion of what I post on my regular account.

Welcome, new users!

One of the big benefits of Mastodon is a locally administered server—the admins are people you can actually talk with directly—AND there is a "local" timeline. You can see local users and what they're talking about by checking out https://mspsocial.net/web/timelines/public/local

New Patreon post with updates on moderation activity and finances:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/miscellaneous-28376186

(for the time being I've bypassed the CDN)

Seems to be something janky with images loading, and it appears the problem is with Digital Ocean's CDN.

I'll monitor it and see if things improve or if I need to fix a workaround.

I've silenced fosstodon.org.

Their admin's nonpology, his concession that he doesn't believe he violated his own CoC, and the plan to rewrite their CoC 'more clearly' make it clear that they don't really want to police themselves.

If this changes I will revisit this decision.

Digital Ocean Network Maintenance may affect MSP Social:

Start: 2019-06-27 Midnight (Central)
End: 2019-06-27 4:00am (Central

During the above window, the networking team will be upgrading core networking equipment to improve performance and reliability for our NYC3 location

Expected Impact:

There will be several minutes of packet loss while we shift traffic between redundant devices.

I noticed a problem with some posts getting pulled into the feed. I fixed that, and then we got stuck in a sidekiq queue-vortex that we could never escape from.

Upshot is that I cancelled a big pile of pending stuff in order to make progress on the queue. Sorry!

FYI I'm going to be pulling 2.8 into the MSP Social fork sometime in the next week or so, and then looking to deploy it.

This will add some new features, including polls, and will replace one of our customizations: there is now a built in system for being invite-only, so I will shift to that, replacing the customization we did on the front page to send me an email.

Thanks for your patience.

Images are now hosted/being served from DigitalOcean Spaces object storage. This should provide for less-expensive image storage and growth in the short- and medium-term. Images are also being cached and served by a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which, ideally, will speed up some image load times.

Images are good to go for now, but the conversion didn't work so I'll try again later when I understand why it didn't work.

I'm going to attempt to switch the place images are stored and served from in the next few minutes.

Ideally, this should be completely unnoticeable except a brief pause in responsiveness while Mastodon restarts. But if I have it configured incorrectly, there may be undesired effects.

If you post an image after I've switched the storage location and before I've confirmed it works, the image may disappear temporarily or possibly forever.

Will follow up when testing is complete.

This is on hold while I re-copy the files.

I'm about to monkey with how the images are served, which might work right on the first try, or it might break images for a bit.

I'll let you know when things are settled.

MSP Social finances update

Thanks for being part of the community!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/finances-update-24586662

I want to thank MSP Social's contributors for keeping this site running, including new contributors @june and @wafflesoup !

I aim to pull together a financial transparency update this weekend (if I can't get to it sooner).

And thanks to everyone for hanging out! 💖

With the help of @nicepersonality I've noticed a snafu with one of the dependencies that was causing some federation fails to pile up in sidekiq.

I think I've fixed the underlying problem and the failed attempts are clearing.

If you were noticing any errors since the upgrade, this may help.

We are now running Mastodon 2.7.0 and we have local-only toots.

There is now a little chain icon in the compose window. You can pick between federated and local-only.

This is code from a pending pull request that has not been incorporated into the main branch, so we'll be seeing how well it works and how much we like it together.

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/8427

I'm working on compiling a new Mastodon version. More Ruby dependencies problems, but ideally nothing will break while I work things out.

If it does, that's what I'm working on.

Happy New Year to everyone, and thank you to each person who is contributing to keep the site running!

https://www.patreon.com/posts/23679143

You can now opt-in to add yourself to an MSP Social "directory" of users. https://mspsocial.net/explore

To do so, check the relevant box in the "edit profile" page.

If you have hashtags in your bio, it will organize users by topic.