Search

Items tagged with: MastoAdmin


We are aware of an ongoing wave of subscription spam throughout the fediverse.

We are investigating avenues to mitigate this, but they will likely involve deep changes in the sign-up flow that may break sign-up from existing applications.

In the meantime, you can find helpful resources at about.iftas.org/2026/09/11/boo…

#MastoAdmin


The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.

🦣 Herds that roam apart still come down to the same waterhole to keep watch together.

Introducing Waterhole: an open-source collaborative moderation tool built specifically for Mastodon instances that manually review and approve signups.

As Fediverse communities grow or spam waves hit, registration queues can quickly become overwhelming. Waterhole gives your moderation team a shared, real-time workspace to review applicants efficiently without compromising server autonomy or applicant privacy.

✨ Key Features:
• 📋 Shared Queues: Pending registration requests mirror directly into Waterhole. Claim requests, filter them by risk, and coordinate review status in real time.
• 💬 Team Discussion: Leave internal notes and discuss applicants collaboratively before deciding.
• 🔍 Proactive Signals: Automated checks highlight known throwaway email providers, datacenter IPs, Tor exits, templated join reasons, and burst signup patterns.
• 🛡️ Collective Defense: Opt-in cross-instance alerts notify you when the same spammer or bot pattern is prowling around multiple herds. Sharing only behavioral tracks and signals, never private applicant details.
• 🔒 Full Server Autonomy: Approvals and rejections are dispatched directly back to your instance via your Mastodon Admin API. No automated bans or AI decisions. You always keep complete control over who joins your community.

Waterhole is 100% free software under AGPLv3.

🔗 Connect your Mastodon instance to our Waterhole:
waterhole.toot.io/about

💻 Explore the source code, documentation, contribute, or self-host:
github.com/tootio/waterhole

#Mastodon #Fediverse #FediverseAdmin #MastoAdmin #OpenSource #SelfHosted #Privacy


Poll for Mastodon administrators *who are not using containers/Docker* : how are you installing Ruby?

If other, please reply to explain how you do it, and why.

For context, we are looking at reducing the number of Ruby versions supported by Mastodon to reduce our maintenance burden (like supporting only Ruby 4.0 in the next version) and want to better understand the impact of such a decision.

#mastoadmin

  • Using rbenv as per our documentation (85%, 85 votes)
  • Using rvm or another Ruby version manager (2%, 2 votes)
  • Manually installing the version from .ruby-version (4%, 4 votes)
  • Other (like from your distribution packages) (9%, 9 votes)
100 voters. Poll end: 2 weeks ago


We released the first beta for Mastodon 4.7 today. It contains very few user-facing changes, but contains significant reworks of the backend code to improve security and support new protocol features.

This update includes substantial database migrations that might take up to a couple of hours on very large servers, but will not cause downtime if the upgrade instructions are followed.

Release notes and upgrade instructions are available here: github.com/mastodon/mastodon/r…

#mastoadmin



We are planning to release new Mastodon security updates for versions 4.4, 4.5, 4.6 and nightly this Monday, Jul 27, at around 14:00 UTC.

It solves two major security issues.

We encourage server administrators to plan for an update in the hours following the release to ensure their instance is protected. These versions will not require database migrations.

#mastoadmin


We've closed signups on indieweb.social for the weekend after a huge increase in attempted spam sign ups.

We aren't the only instance going through this. Please show your support to the amazing moderators across the Fediverse! 💙 ☁️

#FediAdmin #SpamWave #Moderation #Admin #Indieweb #FediMod #MastoAdmin



Not to let the cat out of the bag prematurely, but...

If you were going to start posting about cool servers that aren't run by Mastodon GmbH on the @Mastodon account, which hashtag would you use?

#Mastodon #Fediverse #MastoAdmin

  • #ServerFeature (1%, 7 votes)
  • #ServerSpotlight (87%, 340 votes)
  • #ServerHighlight (7%, 29 votes)
  • Something else? Comment please! (2%, 11 votes)
387 voters. Poll end: 3 months ago


The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.

Our MCAT tool, the Mastodon Canada Administration Tool, enables all of our administrators to have deep, audited interactions with our infrastructure.

It was built in-house and is a critical component to keep our instance current.

#mstdnca #MastoAdmin #SysAdmin


The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.

@jools @tux@anonsys.net
@AlienJay

Naja, es nervt halt etwas. Wenn man in einem Toot vier oder fünf Hashtags verwendet, wird der Beitrag innerhalb von Sekunden vier- oder fünfmal geteilt. Andererseits habe ich den Eindruck, dass meine Beiträge dadurch ein bisschen mehr Reichweite bekommen. Kann aber auch reine Einbildung sein.

Ähnliche Bots gibt es übrigens schon, allerdings funktionieren die erst auf Anfrage und werden nicht automatisch aktiv.

Ich bin noch unschlüssig, ob wir das hier jetzt sperren sollen🤔

#tagspub #mastoadmin



The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.

Hmm, the automated spambots are very, very active suddenly. #MastoAdmin


The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.

Automated spambots, all with a template user request, and all with three way domains that are random URLs. #MastoAdmin #spambots


We just released Mastodon 4.5.10, 4.4.17, and 4.3.23.

These versions contain several medium and high severity security fixes.

Also, please note that this marks the final Mastodon v4.3 update, this branch is now unsupported. If you are still using it, please move to a newer version as soon as possible.

Full release notes and update instructions are available on the GitHub releases page.

github.com/mastodon/mastodon/r…

#MastoAdmin


Ugh, something is freaking eating my lunch with network costs for media from Mastodon. And GCP media hosting via cloud buckets doesn't seem to have any great ways to filter that / figure out if it's from AI scrapers or something else (and do anything about it if I could figure that out).

Any #MastoAdmin folks fight with this already and have any suggestions?



Fellow #MastoAdmin people: if you need to track down all users invited by a particular user, here's an SQL query (disclosure: generated by Gemini, vetted and validated by me): see next post.



What's the best solution out there right now for single user #ActivityPub instances to get proper search across posts, accounts, and hashtags? I'm aware of tags.pub -- what else is there, especially for full-text search?

#Fediverse #Selfhost #Mastoadmin


Fediverse Sustainability Survey


As part of the work on Fediverse sustainability announced earlier this year, the Social Web Foundation is running our first Fediverse Sustainability Survey . We’re seeking operators, moderators and administrators of Fediverse sites, from the smallest to the largest, to fill out the anonymous survey and share information about how their instances work. If you help run an instance, please take the 10-15 minutes needed to fill out the survey. We need a lot of responses (hundreds!) to get statistically relevant data, so please feel free to share the link. We’re also on the lookout for operators of instances that are no longer running; there is a lot to learn about sustainability from servers that closed down, for whatever reason. We’ll publish findings here as part of our sustainability report, supplemented by interviews with selected respondents. Thanks!


Wait, what? If I follow hashtags on one instance, I only see stuff from that instance? Something is rotten in the state of Denm... Eh, Mastodon. #mastodon #mastoadmin #mastolivre #masto

⇧