Toot.cat/history

History

TootCat was founded in 2017 by @polymerwitch and administered by @cyrinsong and @wavebeem, with moderation help from @ashkitten. In May, they created their own fork of Mastodon 1.4.1, mainly to improve the layout somewhat and create a special English variant called "Catspeak" (code: en-TC) which replaced "boost" (reblog), "favorite", and "mention" with "bap", "boop", and "meow at".

The team soon found itself overwhelmed with IRL responsibilities, however, and site maintenance declined. This started to become a problem when Mastodon 2.0 was released and Toot.Cat (which was still running 1.x) could no longer DM (direct message) most other instances; it finally became critical on approximately December 30, 2017, when the SSL certificate failed to auto-renew and the site became unreachable for most users.

I (woozle) then offered to help with admin duties, to which @polymerwitch responded enthusiastically that she'd be happy to just have someone take over hosting and administration completely.

The transfer took place in early January, 2018. I requested the aid of @cobaltvelvet@octodon.social in doing the upgrade to the then-current Mastodon version, as well as fixing the SSL issue, both of which she accomplished smoothly and quickly.

Timeline (newest to oldest)

• 2024: Dan (@Meatballhat) converted it to use Deployer and other associated tools, since neither of us were really able to understand how the Nix setup worked, and basically migrated it from DigitalOcean to Hetzner more or less singlehandedly
• 2022:
  • ash converted the server to NixOS, and created a failsafe deployment script.
  • Viv has been massively helpful getting things upgraded.
  • Dan has automated some processes and also handles upgrades.
  • Ruby and Stephanie joined the mod team, helping to deal with the first massive Twitterfail influx (among other things).
• 2020: Xenon Fiber joined the op team in 2020, replacing others who needed a break.
• 2018-03-30: Recognizing the need for some more easily-referenced online presence, I (@Woozle) set up this companion wiki (mew.toot.cat, what you're reading now).
• 2017-12-31: Ownership is handed over to @Woozle.

Somewhere I have a link to an archive of the first Toot on TootCat...