The Sunny Gardener - June 2024

Meta Increases

Continuing their gradual adoption of the Fediverse, Facebook’s Threads app users can now see replies to their posts which come from the Fediverse. This is the first time that Threads users have been able to see any content from the Fediverse, instead of just being able to publish to it. (sunny.garden does not federate with Threads)

Threads has also published their own list of moderated (blocked) Fediverse servers. While there are lots of entries you would expect, there are also some that raise questions about their rationale and evaluation process.

The Mastodon flagship server mastodon.social was briefly listed, though this appeared to be a mistake that was corrected within a few hours. Accidentally blocking mastodon.social is practically a rite of passage for new fediverse admins.

Unexpected Downtime

I did a system package update on July 1 that ended up being more invasive than I expected, stopping the database and taking the server offline for about 20 minutes. A reboot of the server brought everything back up.

Mastodon Security Patch

On July 4, the Mastodon project released a small patch v4.2.10 to address a number of security issues, and sunny.garden was upgraded shortly after the release without issues or downtime.

Summary

Overall activity has been ticking along as usual, slightly up this month.

Hosting Costs

Backups and media storage costs were actually down a few dollars this month, possibly as a result of older backups expiring after the database cleanup in April.

As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.

– Brook