I started playing with DragonflyDB to replace Redis as the app data storage for a Mastodon instance. Redis used 22 GB of memory, DragonflyDB uses 8.5 GB.

That's very impressive, probably in part because Mastodon uses a lot of sorted sets (for timelines) and Dragonfly stores those in a much more efficient data structure, resulting in a lot less overhead (see https://www.dragonflydb.io/blog/dragonfly-new-sorted-set).
Additional bonus: they provide a K8s operator, with built-in HA

I would encourage every Fediverse software project to implement a “dead-man switch" on registrations: if nobody with moderator permissions has been active in the last week, then disable new account creation.

The Fediverse has a significant number of abandoned instances that are used by bad actors to create accounts and send spam.

We implemented this in Mastodon (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29318) and it has been highly effective.

We released Mastodon 4.3 today, packed with a lot of awesome features: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/10/mastodon-4.3/

I want to thank @Claire, @Gargron, @dave for their hard work on the code, as well as @samhenrigold for the design. Also a lot of thanks to our regular contributors, including @matt and @thisismissem

Now let's focus on 4.4! We have a lot of exiting things to work on, we will do our best to release it before September 2025 😅

#mastodev #mastoadmin

As this worked for the Internet Archive, let’s try another one:
I am looking first an engineering contact at Youtube to troubleshoot the issue with them no longer returning metadata when Mastodon tries to fetch the preview for a video. It comes from their side and something changed a few weeks ago, and I would like to see how this can be fixed.

Fediverse, do your magic ✨

Question for #ActivityPub implementors: has there been any research on how to best handle deletions (accounts and/or posts)?

At the moment, the best (and only?) way to know that an account deletion has been federated everywhere is to notify any known inbox / instance, for every account deletion.

This is very wasteful and not efficient, are there any alternatives? Has anyone worked on this?

Nobody seems to have noticed it but the Mastodon project have been granted funding by @NGIZero in the Entrust fund.

This is amazing, but the best part is that this funding is targeted at implementing… Quote Posts 🎉

This effort started several months ago and we already did some preliminary work, but this will be a big feature for our next 4.4 version. This funding will cover the ActivityPub work, as well as backend, web frontend and official mobile app implementation.

I said it several times, but with Ivory's latest announcement, let me repeat it: we (the Mastodon team) are working on implementing Quote Posts. This is a much more complex feature than showing a preview for a link to a post, which is done at the moment by multiple clients.

It is a complex task and we have been working on defining the feature and the protocol-level details for some time. We are moving forward, and there are fewer hard questions to answers, but progress is there.

I am happy to announce that I am now officially part of the Mastodon core team, as CTO of Mastodon gGmbH (the non-profit developing the project).

Thank you @gargron for trusting me!

In this role, I will provide technical direction for the project, overview the infrastructure and streamline the contributing experience, as I have been doing since the start of the year.

Look at those beauties 😍

#Merchtodon

Full text search has been merged in #Mastodon `main` branch, and will be in the next (and final?) 4.2.0 beta 🎉

It is opt-in, so it will take some time to be filled with people content as they enable their profile to be indexed, but this was one of the most wanted Mastodon features for some time.

We plan to deploy it to mastodon.social and mastodon.online in the coming days to have a bit more feedback on it and see how it behaves in the wild.