Mastodon Week 2

After another week of Mastodon instance running, I’ve learned a few more things. So, here they are.

Sizing: Sizing was a problem! Turned out this was due to some choices I’d made (which I’ll discuss later). By the end of things, I went from a giant Sidekiq job backlog to none at all, and from a 2 vCPU/4GB droplet to a 4 vCPU/8GB droplet. This is actually too big now but it’s going to stay that way until I get some actual monitoring going on the machine. DigitalOcean provides some but I’d like some better stuff.

Relays: I added like 7 relays to the server to help grab stuff for my federated timeline. Relays are sort of a garden hose of posts - if you’re connected to a relay, your posts get aggregated and resent by the relay to the other connected instances. For me, this ended up creating two problems.

1. I had too many of them and that spawned a ton of jobs that my smaller droplet couldn’t keep up with. If you want to add a relay to your instance, maybe only do one or two. (And you’ll want to be very judicious about what relays you add.)
2. As for the relays I’d added from this list that I’d mentioned in the previous post: yeah, don’t do that. If you add a relay, you need to go through the published connections list to see who’s connected to the relay first or you’re going to get a bunch of hate speech and shitposting.

To be honest, once you get started following folks and rolling through hashtags and stuff like that, your instance will find things on its own. If there ends up being some focused relay systems in the future for certain communities, then I can see that being a thing to join up with; otherwise it really does seem to take care of itself.

Upgrades: As I’d noted, the DO one-click installer rolled forward with version 3.1.3 of the Mastodon server software. That’s pretty old and I upgraded it to 4.0.0rc3. (Aside: it’s nice that I can do that! One of the benefits of running your own stack.) It was a pretty easy process. The Mastodon docs mostly cover it but this was the gist of what I ended up doing (note that this is for the DigitalOcean one-click installer environment, yours will be different if it’s not that):

1. Stopped all Mastodon services.
2. Install newer Ruby and Node. rbenv is installed already, so you just use that to install 3.0.4 or newer. I added the NodeSource packages (see nodejs.org) to the apt sources list and installed Node 16 using that.
3. Follow the instructions in the tagged release.

I took a snapshot of my instance before starting. That took longer than the upgrade process. If you’re moving from an old version of Mastodon to a newer one and you’re out a few versions, you should go back and re-trace the release notes to see if anything special needs to be done - in my case, going from 3.1.3 to 4, the instructions for 4.0.0rc3 included all the extra steps. I would have had to do those steps even if I didn’t go to 4.0.0rc3 as they were recommended in verion 3.2 or something. (There’s probably a reason why they’re not, but I kinda think the steps attached to the 4.0.0rc3 release should probably be the steps to do going forward.)

Hashtag pinning and following: This is in 4.0 and it’s great. I heart it.

Anyway, that’s it for now. The machine is humming along nicely and as an added benefit I check Twitter far less often now. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still complimentary services (to me), but I’m enjoying being on the pachyderm site. Next thing on the list is adding some more instrumentation. You get some with DigitalOcean and I have it linked into Pulseway but it’d be nice to get some Prometheus/Grafana and/or Zabbix or something running too.