Mastodon content retention settings

Hugo GameiroMastodon

Mastodon administrators can access a content retention tool in the Mastodon web interface (Administration->Server Settings->Content Retention). This tool has three settings that impact storage usage: Media cache retention period This value is blank by default, so it never deletes the remote media cache.Still, all servers hosted by Masto.host have an automated cache deletion that will automatically delete the remote media … Read More

Automated removal of avatar and header images of inactive remote accounts

Hugo GameiroAnnouncements, Mastodon, SysAdmin

Mastodon version 4.1.0 improved the admin CLI to allow removing avatar and header images cache of inactive remote accounts from media storage. In some cases running this command can reduce media storage usage significantly, and I decided that this was an excellent command to automate. As there were many terabytes of small media files to delete one by one, the … Read More

Can I change the domain name of my Mastodon server?

Hugo GameiroFAQs, Mastodon

Unfortunately, no. The domain name of your Mastodon instance is an essential part of how it functions within the network, and it is impossible to change it without breaking federation. Let’s imagine you have an account @alice on a server Alice.com and follow @bob on the server Bob.com. Whenever @bob makes a post, his server (Bob.com) federates that post to … Read More

RE: Mastodon media storage

Hugo GameiroFAQs, Mastodon

To clarify, when you or another user in your server follows a remote user, from that moment on, all new posts from that remote user start to federate with your server. By federate, you can think of a copy of those posts are stored in the database. If you follow 1000 remote users and another user on your server follows … Read More

Mastodon Full-text search with ElasticSearch

Hugo GameiroMastodon

The default Mastodon search only returns results for posts that have federated with your server and include a hashtag. Mastodon supports ElasticSearch/Full-text search. When enabled, users on a Mastodon server can search posts related to themselves. Examples: Posts they published Posts they favourited Posts where they were mentioned Their direct messages This can be handy but requires a significant amount … Read More

Finding people to follow on Mastodon

Hugo GameiroMastodon

Due to the decentralised nature of Mastodon, finding people to follow may be easier on large Mastodon servers but on smaller ones may require some looking around outside your server. In particular if you are joining a new server or smaller server that will be the case most often than not. If you have just installed a brand new Mastodon … Read More

Mastodon usernames different from the domain used for installation

Hugo GameiroMastodon, SysAdmin

By default when you install Mastodon on a domain, or subdomain, that will determine how the username of users on that Mastodon server will be. Example, if you install Mastodon on social.example.com a user on that server will be @myusername@social.example.com. This can be changed and you can install Mastodon on social.example.com but have your username be @myusername@example.com or even @myusername@differentdomain.com … Read More

Custom processing of videos and GIFs

Hugo GameiroAnnouncements, Mastodon, SysAdmin

Masto.host server resources are shared between Mastodon servers. This offers some optimisation in terms of resource usage for concurrent active users, as people access at different times and peak active users per Mastodon server is very different depending on the location of most of its users. Still, the sharing of resources also causes a problem in terms of federation. When … Read More

Sidekiq and Web limits

Hugo GameiroAnnouncements, Mastodon

Both Sidekiq and Web limits only limit the concurrency, meaning how much “work” they can do simultaneously. As an example, a limit of 2 Sidekiq threads will only allow at any given time a maximum of 2 Sidekiq jobs to be running. The same goes for the Web process but the Web process allows for multiple workers. In theory a … Read More