This version introduces very few user-facing changes but substantially reworks Mastodon's internals to increase security, support new protocols, and pave the way for new features. Updating to this version will be required for zero-downtime migration to the upcoming Mastodon 5.0.

See the dedicated blog post on the Mastodon blog (quite technical but highly interesting if you're into technical posts).

I'll add that I find refreshing to read this kind of gentle disclaimer somewhere along the reading:

If none of this makes sense to you, don’t worry. There is absolutely no need to understand any of this to enjoy using Mastodon. This is only relevant to you if you are developing or running your own fediverse platform. Our next big release, Mastodon 5.0, will be a lot more interesting for everyone!

Always a good practice to be crystal clear about where you're talking from, who you're talking to, and so on. Thanks again to the Mastodon team for their hard work!

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

• Collections “A way for people on Mastodon to curate and share bundles of accounts that they’d recommend to others – helping to grow these connections more quickly, instead of newcomers hunting around for the accounts they might be interested in”
• Public posts as newsletter: a user can now turn their public posts into mailing lists. It needs to be allowed at admin level – Mapstodon.Space users, get in touch if you're interested!
• Profile pages design updates,
• And many bug fixes.

See the detailed release notes. And congrats to the Mastodon team!

Edit: just to make sure everything was as up to date as possible, we upgraded to patch releases 4.6.1 & 4.6.2 in the process. See v4.6.1 & v4.6.2 release notes.

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

Additionnaly, we have unplugged the CDN service that was set up in January with the new infrastructure. After a few weeks of testing, we found out that our instance was small enough to not need such a service – and that the bill was not justified enough to keep it! The only noticeable change should a slightly less elegant URL for the media files, so nothing to really worry about :)

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

The first server, atlas_1, is hosting Mastodon, Sidekick & an Elasticsearch for full-text search, while the second one, atlas_2, is home for PostgreSQL & Redis. Both are located in France and backed up on a daily basis on servers located in Canada.

We also implemented S3 object storage, relying on a bucket provided by OVH as well and located in France. The bucket is fully replicated on another one in Germany. We've configured Fastly as a CDN in front of the object storage to enable faster access to media.

The migration process took longer than expected, due to configuration issues with media storage. Hugo Gameiro at @mastohost@mastodon.social helped us resolve them, among other things along the process.

If you ever fancy running your own Mastodon instance, https://masto.host is definitely the way to go. All along our three years there, not only was the service impeccable, but Hugo was always available, kind and helpful. Cheers and thanks!

You might experience missing medias on your timeline. To get them back, you need to clear your browser cache as it's probably still trying to load medias from the previous infra. Ctrl + Shift + R usually does the trick. We'll also have to wait for a few days before getting full access to the full-text search functionality. Apart from that, all lights are green.

Say hello to https://Mapstodon.Space, reloaded!

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

In order to complete the migration to our new infrastructure, Mapstodon.Space will be offline 4 hours, starting tomorrow Monday Jan. 19 at 1PM UTC.

After using https://masto.host's great services for more than 3 years, with the instance continuing to grow, we felt it was time to fly on our own!

We've set up an infrastructure hosted by OVH in France. There will be few technical or functional changes for now, and users will find the same version of Mastodon, with the optional Elasticsearch-based full-text search feature still enabled.

We already have ideas for the future, but shhh, one thing at a time!

A few final words to thank Hugo from https://masto.host for the quality of his services (which we cannot recommend enough!), his professionalism, as well as his friendliness, and availability for this migration.

Apologies for the interruption, and see you on the other side!

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

The attack started at 12:55 CEST and was mitigated at 14:10 CEST. During that period of time, our DNS servers were overloaded, which would cause random DNS issues (timeout, mostly).

The downtime was unusually long as the attack was exceptionally large, more than 10 times the largest we had ever seen. It targeted government websites, which makes us think it may have been done by a state-level or state-sponsored actor. We had to beef up our DNS anti-DDoS toolbox to successfully mitigate it.

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

Thanks @mastohost@mastodon.social for taking care of this, and thanks everyone for your patience!

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space

11 am UTC, 1 pm UTC+2/Paris, 7 am EDT/New York, 4 am PDT/San Francisco, 9 pm AEST/Sydney.

There will be a two hours downtime to migrate the database to a new server that should increase performance.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and best of luck to @mastohost@mastodon.social for the operation!

— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space