HarleyGood afternoon (or morning) #universeodon 😀
What nerdy #tech stuff are you up to today?
Hello #universeodon, I'm glad to be here and I look forward to many happy toots in the future :)
Ryan WildThe #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.
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.
Apologies to those that have had to wait longer than usual for accounts to be approved here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've had a large spike in spam accounts with increasingly legitimate looking reasons for joining and a wider range of domains and IPs than usual. It's taking a lot more work than normal to work out which accounts appear to be legitimate and which ones are bots / bad actors.
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.
I've just (Rather late due to being busy and then forgetting) updated us to the latest Mastodon patch release on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - There might have been a short blip while servers were rebooted as part of us applying both the Mastodon patches as well as some OS level patches and upgrades.
Just so I can finally clear the announcement off of #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've been running without the Cloudflare Caching / proxy service since November 2025 now and other than the odd hiccup behind the scenes (Which CF wouldn't have helped with anyway) it's been really stable and from the folks that have provided feedback on the performance of the sites, both in the UK (Where we host the sites) and internationally the performance has been noticeably better.
We'll continue to monitor the global performance of the site, we continuously monitor latency and response times from various global endpoints and if it looks like we need to enable some sort of cache / CDN beyond what we now have in place we will re- visit it in the future. The change to remove CF proxying is going to remain permanent and now be "Normal" instead of the response to their global outage last year.