The Sunny Gardener - September 2025

– butterfly on a flower by @jarek

Guppe Groups Are No More

The widely used groups service a.gup.pe went offline unexpectedly this month and won’t be coming back according to its operator.

This was apparently due to certain top level domains (including .pe), allowing domains that are about to expire to be sold off before the stated expiration date. Something to watch out for if you own any country-code domains!

Some groups may have switched to other group services such as fedigroups.social.

Error 500

I made what I had hoped was a minor config change around Sept 5th with the intention of reducing certain kinds of server timeouts during spikes of high traffic, and while it did do that, it also caused users to see HTTP 500 errors during traffic spikes instead, which was worse.

Thanks to the folks who reported seeing the errors over the next couple of days, I investigated and realized that the config change was to blame and reverted it.

Mastodon Updates

There were two small Mastodon updates this month, v4.4.4 and v4.4.5, mostly consisting of small, behind the scenes fixes.

Summary

Hosting Costs

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