The Sunny Gardener - October 2024

Mastodon Updates

A small Mastodon update v4.2.13 was applied on October 4, containing a few small fixes.

Shortly after, Mastodon released v4.3.0, the first major release in a year, and the update was applied to sunny.garden on October 10.

The v4.3 release had a number of significant changes, mainly to the web UI:

• Visual/themes redesign
• Notification grouping, and additional control and filtering of notifications
• Notifications when follow relationships are removed due to server blocks
• Hover cards on usernames
• The ability to reorder uploaded media before posting

I’m particularly glad for the notification grouping, which is a great quality of life change for using the web interface.

Some questionable design choices for the posting interface have removed the “Mark images as sensitive” checkbox, instead hiding this functionality behind the content warning button. If you’d like to mark your post images sensitive – without content warning the whole post – you can still do this, by turning on the content warning button, but leaving the content warning text blank.

I’ve applied a few small style customizations to the new themes, reducing the contrast of the new dark and light themes slightly, and changing the new content warning “hazard stripes” border to flannel.

Another improvement in this release (that is mostly invisible except to admins) is the switch from ImageMagick to libvips for image processing, resulting in a noticeable reduction in CPU load on the servers.

Spam Wave

On October 9, an apparent second run of the Japanese spam campaign in February began, once again mainly targetting Misskey and Mastodon servers with open registration.

I blocked most of the servers affected from our side, and while the bots continued to run for several days, most of the affected servers did eventually clean up the bots and close registrations.

Thanks to the IFTAS group for helping coordinate blocks, and reaching out to the admins of servers where the spam bots were operating from.

botsin.space Shutting Down

botsin.space – the bot-focused server home to bots like @RikerGoogling – has announced that it will shut down mainly due to the cost of running the server.

The server will go read-only around December 15 but stay online until at least March to enable migrations, data exports, etc.

Summary

A moderate increase in new users and overall activity this month.

There were quite a few reports, and while a handful of them were due to the spam wave mentioned above, most of them were just due to an increase in general spam.

Hosting Costs

As expected, hosting costs were stable for the month.

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