A number of folks have reached out to us over the past few months asking how they could help Mastodon out. Unfortunately, we haven't had the capacity to accept those kind offers at the time.

If you're interested in getting involved as a volunteer, please fill out this form (and share it around!) so we know who could help with what. (There is plenty that needs doing!)

https://joinmastodon.typeform.com/to/PdqUZCAg

If you try bash for loop ranges using shell vars it will not work:
S=1
E=5
for i in {${S}..${E}}; do echo "$i"; done

The workaround is to use the seq command or eval command:
S=1
E=5
for i in $(eval echo "{${S}..${E}}"); do echo "$i"; done

See https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/unix-linux-iterate-over-a-variable-range-of-numbers-in-bash/ for more including other examples such as arrays to solve this issue.

So mastodon.social was under a DDoS attack.

@Gargron confirms this.

Someone out there doesn't like the Fediverse.

But also, if they thought that taking down mastodon.social would take down the Fediverse, then they were incredibly foolish!

The Fediverse is built on redundancies.

This isn't like Twitter where a Fail Whale would bring down the entire social network.

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109781490892884305

Ever want to quickly see a hex color value from the command line? Try using ImageMagick display and making a easy to use function to call it.

showcolor() { display -size 400x400 xc:"#${1}"; }
showcolor 6823AF