#mastodonappuk — Public Fediverse posts

For those that haven't noticed (Hopefully most folks), I've updated #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon to the latest Mastodon release tonight. I think for the most part it shouldn't have had any obvious impact other than a short blip on Universeodon while the web server rebooted (I haven't quite had a chance to setup a second web server for Universeodon yet!).

I think we've got the process of upgrades working a lot better and keeping in-step with the releases has been a lot easier than it was!

For those that haven't noticed (Hopefully most folks), I've updated #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon to the latest Mastodon release tonight. I think for the most part it shouldn't have had any obvious impact other than a short blip on Universeodon while the web server rebooted (I haven't quite had a chance to setup a second web server for Universeodon yet!).

I think we've got the process of upgrades working a lot better and keeping in-step with the releases has been a lot easier than it was!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The #Universeodon instance is now updated to Mastodon 4.6.

The good folks over at @MastodonEngineering 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.

The #Universeodon instance is now updated to Mastodon 4.6.

The good folks over at @MastodonEngineering 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.

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.

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.

Quick update for #MastodonAppUK folks

It looks like around mid-day today we became the target of a pretty aggressive scraper from Singapore. I've gone ahead now and blocked the traffic from passing both our Gateway as well as our load balancers. Unfortunately as the connections were already established our Gateway wasn't blocking a lot of the established connections but the load balancer should now be doing that.

It looks like they were sustaining around 300 requests per second after our initial block and prior to that it looks to be anywhere from 1000 to 3000 requests per second we were seeing which is why the instance has been feeling sluggish.

Graph attached broken down per second for all the matching requests in the last 8 hours.

Quick update for #MastodonAppUK folks

It looks like around mid-day today we became the target of a pretty aggressive scraper from Singapore. I've gone ahead now and blocked the traffic from passing both our Gateway as well as our load balancers. Unfortunately as the connections were already established our Gateway wasn't blocking a lot of the established connections but the load balancer should now be doing that.

It looks like they were sustaining around 300 requests per second after our initial block and prior to that it looks to be anywhere from 1000 to 3000 requests per second we were seeing which is why the instance has been feeling sluggish.

Graph attached broken down per second for all the matching requests in the last 8 hours.

I've found one issue which looks to be with our DB Configuration. I'm going to apply the latest patches to the DB Server and reboot it which should apply our latest config changes. There might be a short outage here on #MastodonAppUK while I apply the patches and reboot the VM.

I've found one issue which looks to be with our DB Configuration. I'm going to apply the latest patches to the DB Server and reboot it which should apply our latest config changes. There might be a short outage here on #MastodonAppUK while I apply the patches and reboot the VM.

It looks like we're continuing to see a fairly significant spike in traffic which is being sustained since around mid-day UK Time.

I'm doing some digging to see if I can see any obvious patterns but it seems to be impacting #MastodonAppUK only currently.

I've added additional capacity to our web nodes to try to handle the processing of this additional traffic but we're seeing both more traffic and larger responses to the requests which is all putting a notable strain on our servers.

It looks like we're continuing to see a fairly significant spike in traffic which is being sustained since around mid-day UK Time.

I'm doing some digging to see if I can see any obvious patterns but it seems to be impacting #MastodonAppUK only currently.

I've added additional capacity to our web nodes to try to handle the processing of this additional traffic but we're seeing both more traffic and larger responses to the requests which is all putting a notable strain on our servers.

We also seem to be having some performance and stability issues here on #MastodonAppUk I'm looking into it.

We also seem to be having some performance and stability issues here on #MastodonAppUk I'm looking into it.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I've disabled the ability now for folks to create invites here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've had some issues with folks using it as a way to bypass our approval checks resulting in some accounts getting registered that I'm not happy have been registered. Those accounts are being dealt with but for the time being invites will be disabled so apologies.

The upcoming Mastodon 4.6 version should have some extra settings that will allow us to re-enable invites while maintaining our approval checks and we're working behind the scenes on a few things that we hope will streamline approvals either way.

I've disabled the ability now for folks to create invites here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've had some issues with folks using it as a way to bypass our approval checks resulting in some accounts getting registered that I'm not happy have been registered. Those accounts are being dealt with but for the time being invites will be disabled so apologies.

The upcoming Mastodon 4.6 version should have some extra settings that will allow us to re-enable invites while maintaining our approval checks and we're working behind the scenes on a few things that we hope will streamline approvals either way.

I've just (Rather late due to being busy and then forgetting) updated us to the latest Mastodon patch release on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - There might have been a short blip while servers were rebooted as part of us applying both the Mastodon patches as well as some OS level patches and upgrades.

I've just (Rather late due to being busy and then forgetting) updated us to the latest Mastodon patch release on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - There might have been a short blip while servers were rebooted as part of us applying both the Mastodon patches as well as some OS level patches and upgrades.

Just so I can finally clear the announcement off of #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've been running without the Cloudflare Caching / proxy service since November 2025 now and other than the odd hiccup behind the scenes (Which CF wouldn't have helped with anyway) it's been really stable and from the folks that have provided feedback on the performance of the sites, both in the UK (Where we host the sites) and internationally the performance has been noticeably better.

We'll continue to monitor the global performance of the site, we continuously monitor latency and response times from various global endpoints and if it looks like we need to enable some sort of cache / CDN beyond what we now have in place we will re- visit it in the future. The change to remove CF proxying is going to remain permanent and now be "Normal" instead of the response to their global outage last year.

Just so I can finally clear the announcement off of #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've been running without the Cloudflare Caching / proxy service since November 2025 now and other than the odd hiccup behind the scenes (Which CF wouldn't have helped with anyway) it's been really stable and from the folks that have provided feedback on the performance of the sites, both in the UK (Where we host the sites) and internationally the performance has been noticeably better.

We'll continue to monitor the global performance of the site, we continuously monitor latency and response times from various global endpoints and if it looks like we need to enable some sort of cache / CDN beyond what we now have in place we will re- visit it in the future. The change to remove CF proxying is going to remain permanent and now be "Normal" instead of the response to their global outage last year.

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.

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.

We're adding mastodon.cloud to our #Fediblock list due to the instance seemingly being abandoned with open signups and zero moderation. The burden of us suspending accounts locally is not practical when the instance is out of date and not being maintained.

It's been flagged since August last year - https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/115027342813989021 so I don't see it likely that anything is suddenly going to change.

#MastodonAppUK #Universeodon #FediMedi #MastoAdmin

We're adding mastodon.cloud to our #Fediblock list due to the instance seemingly being abandoned with open signups and zero moderation. The burden of us suspending accounts locally is not practical when the instance is out of date and not being maintained.

It's been flagged since August last year - https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/115027342813989021 so I don't see it likely that anything is suddenly going to change.

#MastodonAppUK #Universeodon #FediMedi #MastoAdmin

Apologies for the blip there impacting a wide range of the sites we run ( #MastodonAppUK / #Universeodon / #FediMedi and for #MastoAdmin The Universeodon relay).

It looks like the NIC in one of our app servers had some sort of weird failure which prevented traffic on one of the two interfaces and due to it being setup in aggregation and not failover it caused a total outage of that server and all the VM's and CT's running on it.

We have also identified some issues with our secondary HAProxy instance which we need to get to the bottom of as things did not fail over as expected (Even though we know we haven't got full HA operational yet across all services because storage and RAM prices are through the roof and we need to add a third server for that).

Apologies again, we should be back to normal for now.

Apologies for the blip there impacting a wide range of the sites we run ( #MastodonAppUK / #Universeodon / #FediMedi and for #MastoAdmin The Universeodon relay).

It looks like the NIC in one of our app servers had some sort of weird failure which prevented traffic on one of the two interfaces and due to it being setup in aggregation and not failover it caused a total outage of that server and all the VM's and CT's running on it.

We have also identified some issues with our secondary HAProxy instance which we need to get to the bottom of as things did not fail over as expected (Even though we know we haven't got full HA operational yet across all services because storage and RAM prices are through the roof and we need to add a third server for that).

Apologies again, we should be back to normal for now.

Apologies for the issues currently impacting #MastodonAppUK - We're seeing a spike in database capacity requirements and are working to investigate and resolve the issue. We've already scaled up the DB by around 50GB following an earlier outage which has already been fully consumed. I'm working to get the site back up and running ASAP.

Apologies for the issues currently impacting #MastodonAppUK - We're seeing a spike in database capacity requirements and are working to investigate and resolve the issue. We've already scaled up the DB by around 50GB following an earlier outage which has already been fully consumed. I'm working to get the site back up and running ASAP.

I've just pushed a minor change to our infrastructure configuration for #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - I'm hoping this should fix some of the weird issues we've seen around IPv6 and it does mean that if our primary HAproxy server does go down for any reason the secondary server will take on the IPv6 connectivity as well.

I do need to look and see if I can do something smart to cover some IPv6 monitoring as right now IPv6 can silently fail and the site will still show as fully healthy.

I've just pushed a minor change to our infrastructure configuration for #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - I'm hoping this should fix some of the weird issues we've seen around IPv6 and it does mean that if our primary HAproxy server does go down for any reason the secondary server will take on the IPv6 connectivity as well.

I do need to look and see if I can do something smart to cover some IPv6 monitoring as right now IPv6 can silently fail and the site will still show as fully healthy.

Just as a bit of notice for #MastodonAppUk and #Universeodon folks

There will be an outage later this evening to facilitate the work I need to do here at the dc. Hoping it won't take too long and I'll let folks know when I have an idea on time.

I'm just waiting now for a dc staff member to let me through the front gate as it's a weekend so nobody's normally here 😂

Just as a bit of notice for #MastodonAppUk and #Universeodon folks

There will be an outage later this evening to facilitate the work I need to do here at the dc. Hoping it won't take too long and I'll let folks know when I have an idea on time.

I'm just waiting now for a dc staff member to let me through the front gate as it's a weekend so nobody's normally here 😂

It looks like I'm going to need to drive up to the DC now because I can't reasonably apply my fix remotely without risking breaking everything and having to go up there anyway.

For folks here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon if you'd like to chip in to support my growing coffee addiction with the nonsense that is servers and kit breaking I would always appreciate it.

One Off / Monthly on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/mastodonappuk

And monthly support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/universeodon

The support is really appreciated and allows me to continue investing in the hardware and resources required to keep the sites online and with the continued goal now of removing dependencies on external parties.

It looks like I'm going to need to drive up to the DC now because I can't reasonably apply my fix remotely without risking breaking everything and having to go up there anyway.

For folks here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon if you'd like to chip in to support my growing coffee addiction with the nonsense that is servers and kit breaking I would always appreciate it.

One Off / Monthly on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/mastodonappuk

And monthly support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/universeodon

The support is really appreciated and allows me to continue investing in the hardware and resources required to keep the sites online and with the continued goal now of removing dependencies on external parties.

It looks like the connectivity issues between #Universeodon and #MastodonAppUK are at least in part due to SideKiq and IPv6.

I've disabled IPv6 on SideKiq for the time being to at least let me try and get things back operational.

For now though it's very much past my bedtime and I need sleep!

It looks like the connectivity issues between #Universeodon and #MastodonAppUK are at least in part due to SideKiq and IPv6.

I've disabled IPv6 on SideKiq for the time being to at least let me try and get things back operational.

For now though it's very much past my bedtime and I need sleep!

We're having some major issues this evening across #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon due to connectivity issues with our primary gateway router at our data center.

I'm waiting on some network monitoring info from our ISP but I'm starting to suspect this may be some sort of attack as I can't think of any other reason our router would be seemingly crashing regularly.

It seems as if the device comes online for a few seconds and then drops back off the internet.

Thankfully it doesn't seem to be actively impacting the sites themselves but our content processing is currently almost entirely offline due to issues with outbound connectivity.

We're having some major issues this evening across #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon due to connectivity issues with our primary gateway router at our data center.

I'm waiting on some network monitoring info from our ISP but I'm starting to suspect this may be some sort of attack as I can't think of any other reason our router would be seemingly crashing regularly.

It seems as if the device comes online for a few seconds and then drops back off the internet.

Thankfully it doesn't seem to be actively impacting the sites themselves but our content processing is currently almost entirely offline due to issues with outbound connectivity.

We may be seeing some network related issues across #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon

I'm keeping an eye but our router is currently unresponsive.

The status page will be updated should we actually see connectivity drops - https://status.atlas-media.co.uk

We may be seeing some network related issues across #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon

I'm keeping an eye but our router is currently unresponsive.

The status page will be updated should we actually see connectivity drops - https://status.atlas-media.co.uk

Just a note, we have added the following domains to our #Fediblock list across #MastodonAppUK #Universeodon and #MedMastodon

- privacysafe.social
- privacymatters.pro

Both domains have had more than a few recent reports which no action have been taken by the instances with relation to misinformation / anti-vax content and in the case of the second domain transphobia.

Just a note, we have added the following domains to our #Fediblock list across #MastodonAppUK #Universeodon and #MedMastodon

- privacysafe.social
- privacymatters.pro

Both domains have had more than a few recent reports which no action have been taken by the instances with relation to misinformation / anti-vax content and in the case of the second domain transphobia.

For #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon folks - I think I've finally got the IPv6 connectivity working again, I need to do some digging to see what caused it to drop it's address in the first place and have a load of work to get the secondary haproxy instance aligned and sync'd with the first one but I'm hoping this should mean we're now fully operational again and everything should be working :)

For #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon folks - I think I've finally got the IPv6 connectivity working again, I need to do some digging to see what caused it to drop it's address in the first place and have a load of work to get the secondary haproxy instance aligned and sync'd with the first one but I'm hoping this should mean we're now fully operational again and everything should be working :)

I've had a few reports that #MastodonAppUk and #Universeodon are playing up again with IPv6 since the maintenance I had to do yesterday which involved a full reboot of all our servers.

I'm fairly busy with other commitments today but will take a look when I can.

I've had a few reports that #MastodonAppUk and #Universeodon are playing up again with IPv6 since the maintenance I had to do yesterday which involved a full reboot of all our servers.

I'm fairly busy with other commitments today but will take a look when I can.

#MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon

Site's going offline for a short amount of time while I get everything updated. Be right back.