Toot.cat/2018

Site News

Dotster fail - it took several days to establish that they can't handle .cat domains

• 2018-10-11 We now have a Hubzilla instance online at hub.toot.cat! It federates with Mastodon and Diaspora. Borked by an upgrade; haven't had time to fix.
• 2018-08-15 We've upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, compiled Ruby with jemalloc for improved performance, and also upgraded to the latest Mastodon.
  • Apparently its the Gems that take most of the time.
  • Also, @kity@toot.cat did all the work and has rejoined the TootCat team after a prolonged absence.
• 2018-07-25 We've had more waves of spambot registrations -- yesterday morning and this morning. SOP seems to be handling the problem. It would be nice if we could set a toggle to auto-silence new users during these attacks, because doing it by hand is time-consuming and also allows them a window of attack (which, fortunately, they aren't good at exploiting) between when they register and when I notice it.
• 2018-06-02 The last new spambot account was recorded at 1:20pm (probably EDST) on this day. They stopped quite abruptly.
• 2018-05-30 The SSL certificate failed to renew on the new server. Four hours later, I fixed it.
• 2018-05-22 spambots began creating accounts on toot.cat; we soon implemented a policy of immediately suspending any of these that tooted spam links, and silencing the rest.
  • There were a few dozen accounts created as of evening the next day.
• 2018-05-20
  • 13:23 ET A long-overdue server reboot resulted in all message windows being depopulated. I retreated to the TootCave to focus on the problem.
  • 13:39 ET It turned out to be a misconfiguration in Nginx, and I don't know why it was even working before. See 2018/05/20 for details.
• 2018-05-03 Email issues fixed. There nonetheless seems to be a deficit in Mastodon diagnostics.
• 2018-05-01 Ongoing email issues are making me tear my hair out. (How appropriate for May Day!)
• 2018-04-26
  • Toot.Cat is successfully migrated to a new server and the latest version of Mastodon.
  • LottieVixen joins TootCat as sysadmin
• 2018-04-16: working on upgrade and migration
• 2018-01-25: Mastodon software is up-to-date with no major issues.
• 2018-01-02 Dotster finally sorts out that they cannot handle .cat domains

older: 2017

undated

• We also operate a Hubzilla instance at hub.toot.cat. as of January 2021, this is having issues and is unusable.
• @LottieVixen joined the admin team sometime in the early weeks of 2018, and did excellent work migrating (from the original server image set up by the founding team) to a new system. (Lottie is still an admin but is not currently active as a mod as of late 2020.)
• @kity (formerly @ashkitten) rejoined the team (this time as an admin, having been only a moderator previously) in mid-August, and performed a lot of upgrade-and-optimization work in a very short span of time. (ash is still a mod but is taking an extended hiatus from the fediverse as of late 2020.)