The #Universeodon instance is now updated to Mastodon 4.6.
The good folks over at @MastodonEngineering have done all the hard work of writing up what has changed so I'd encourage you to take a look here - https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/06/mastodon-4.6/
Assuming there's nothing that goes horribly wrong in the next day or two I'll also get #MastodonAppUK upgrades later this week.
Some good news, I've managed to get the Mastodon fork we use for #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon now updated for 4.6.
I'm going to try updating #Universeodon fairly shortly so there might be a couple of blips while I perform DB migrations and get everything up and running there. Once I'm happy that Universeodon is working as expected and given it a couple of days for the dust to settle I'll get #MastodonAppUK also upgraded to the same version.
Quick update for #MastodonAppUK folks
It looks like around mid-day today we became the target of a pretty aggressive scraper from Singapore. I've gone ahead now and blocked the traffic from passing both our Gateway as well as our load balancers. Unfortunately as the connections were already established our Gateway wasn't blocking a lot of the established connections but the load balancer should now be doing that.
It looks like they were sustaining around 300 requests per second after our initial block and prior to that it looks to be anywhere from 1000 to 3000 requests per second we were seeing which is why the instance has been feeling sluggish.
Graph attached broken down per second for all the matching requests in the last 8 hours.
It looks like we're continuing to see a fairly significant spike in traffic which is being sustained since around mid-day UK Time.
I'm doing some digging to see if I can see any obvious patterns but it seems to be impacting #MastodonAppUK only currently.
I've added additional capacity to our web nodes to try to handle the processing of this additional traffic but we're seeing both more traffic and larger responses to the requests which is all putting a notable strain on our servers.
Just as a bit of an update for the folks here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon
I haven't quite had the time I expected over the weekend to get the patched and customised version of Mastodon working with 4.6, I'm hoping to have some time later in the week however I am also currently pretty swamped with client work and have a fair bit of work travel coming up.
The plus side to all of this is the client work is what pays my bills and allows me to continue to invest in more hardware, I'm still very keen to get a UK based S3 service operational (Subject to Storage and RAM costs) for us to migrate our media to as well as getting a secondary site with enough capacity to run some of the workload if we ever had an issue on our primary site.
I'm hoping over the next couple of weeks to get us updated to the latest version of Mastodon and will share more as and when I've got useful info to share.
I'm hoping to have some time this week to get our custom tweaks to Mastodon applied to the new 4.6 release over the course of this week with the goal of hopefully getting it deployed to the instances over the weekend.
I'm fortunately pretty busy with project work (Which is what pays my bills!) so time is a bit of a premium for me right now hence the delay of it being this weekend that I will hopefully be able to apply the updates themselves.
I've disabled the ability now for folks to create invites here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've had some issues with folks using it as a way to bypass our approval checks resulting in some accounts getting registered that I'm not happy have been registered. Those accounts are being dealt with but for the time being invites will be disabled so apologies.
The upcoming Mastodon 4.6 version should have some extra settings that will allow us to re-enable invites while maintaining our approval checks and we're working behind the scenes on a few things that we hope will streamline approvals either way.
Ryan Wild