Notices by Eugen 💀 (gargron@mastodon.social), page 6

New Mastodon for iOS build on #TestFlight. Improved login screen, media upload progress and retry on failure, verified links on profiles, bookmarks, a more obvious account switcher, and other fixes.

I think it's glorious that there's now a Mastodon server operated by people who used to work for Twitter (macaw.social). I could have never imagined it when I started in 2016.

Decided to look at network stats again. There are 1M more people using #Mastodon today than there were on October 27.

There are currently some hiccups with the official iOS app's push notification service, I am investigating. It has never seen so much activity before. #devops

I like that I was able to go back to "Publish" in the official iOS and Android apps. It may be less whimsical, and less branded, but after using the platform for such a long time, I'm perfectly happy with a button that just describes what it will do without trying to be cute (not that I dislike cute, I'd never part with our elephant illustrations). I have seen enough "Dr. Doom toots as he pleases" quotes in the first two years of Mastodon to last me a lifetime.

Developing Mastodon, I strive to use terminology that is familiar to as many people as possible so as to not put up unnecessary barriers in understanding. For this reason I am happy that we went away from calling posts "toots". It has always been a point of friction for people. Not that I dislike branding, quite the opposite, but in my experience receiving feedback over half a decade, it had a negative effect on the platform for little benefit.

Probably not a lot of people know this now, but Mastodon's web app started out with "Publish". In 2016 a famous YouTuber jokingly offered to support Mastodon's Patreon forever if I changed the button to say "Toot" instead. Needless to say, this was a really early, and not very informed decision. The first glimpse of attention and financial support. As a non-native speaker I had no idea there was another meaning.

Hey! Spent all day (technically night) fixing delayed feeds on mastodon.social and mastodon.online, both are back to normal now, I had to add more capacity. There's just so much more activity during peak hours, even with closed registrations! #devops

I've changed quite a few parts on joinmastodon.org/servers today in response to the feedback from the past week. In detail:

You can now filter by region, type of legal entity, and sign-up speed. Added note about why the topics filter exists. Changed tagline.

"Get on waitlist" has become "Apply for an account" for servers that manually review new sign-ups. Removed total user count from cards.

Hey, so, we've hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today. 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27, and 489,003 new users. That's pretty cool.

Pictures and videos should now be loading fast again on mastodon.social. The load balancer was hitting the limits of its hardware too so I had to upgrade it #devops

I don't think Mastodon or the fediverse has ever received this much attention before. It's a great opportunity for people to finally see that social media can be done differently, that it can be a protocol not under control of any single company.

199,430 is the number of new users across different Mastodon servers since October 27, along with 437 new servers. This bring last day's total to 608,837 active users, which is without precedent the highest it's ever been for Mastodon and the fediverse.

From 8 cores to 36 cores processing power, let's see how the new database server holds up. Hopefully everything will be much faster from now on, but it should also give me a bit more room to scale horizontally.

mastodon.social has once again caught up with real-time. I haven't received the new machine for the database yet (seems like the technical issues unfortunately overlapped with some bank holidays; hopefully tomorrow) but I managed to find a way to optimize some code that seems to have helped. Thank you for being patient, and again, I'm really sorry you couldn't experience Mastodon at its best the past few days on here.

I have ordered a more powerful machine for our database server from Hetzner last evening, but they still haven't provisioned it. It seems we're doomed to experience these processing delays until I can get my hands on more hardware. Sorry!

The past few days have extracted a heavy toll from me. While it's nice to see your work finally taken seriously in the mainstream, the 12-14 hour workdays I've had to pull to handle everything is anything but...

The German equivalent of The Onion, Der Postillon, made a joke article about Mastodon and I am baffled at how many people seem to think it is real 🤦♂️

Mastodon is operated, maintained, and moderated by different passionate individuals and organizations, often out of their own pocket. Check if your server accepts donations on its about page if you want to help out!

So, that total... By the end of day, it's more like 70,849... That's quite a lot for a single day, isn't it. Federated social media is better than commercial silos, and I'm happy that more people are learning about it.