2018

Site News

• 2020/03/31 site TootCat going down for an upgrade
• 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.

Mastodon News

• 2018-07-03 The #ForkTogether project now has a wiki.
• 2018-06-02
  • Apparently mastodon.cloud has been down for over a week, a new toot.cat user reports. So has instance.business. I've inquired.
  • A lot of anger and resentment has brewed between Gargron and marginalized users over issues with Mastodon design and governance.
• 2018-04-30
  • Sina of cutie.space announced (cache) that she will no longer be serving Mastodon from that domain, effective within a matter of hours, due to a decline in users, and will be replacing it (cache) with something less resource-intensive.
  • witches.town goes offline
  • Woozle posts a reassurance that toot.cat will not be going away anytime soon.
• 2018-04-27 Ginny McQueen of kitty.town posted on Medium asking for help; Woozle posted about it on Google+.
• 2018-04-02 The sysop of witches.town announced that the site will be shutting down on April 30.