Notices by trumpet@mas.to (trumpet@mas.to)

HELLO THERE!

We've upgraded to Mastodon v4.5.7. It's a bug fix release, so I guess that means some bugs are fixed?

More details here:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.5.7

🙂

Hello everyone! We had a rough week last week, with two horrible accounts using our instance as a platform to spread hate, and an outage when we tried to upgrade to v4.5.0. Both of these really bothered us, so after a period of reflection, we've decided to make some changes.

We want to focus on making mas.to the best instance we can for our existing users (many of whose donations keep us running!) and their friends. And so we're moving to an invitation-only model until further notice.

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@aral We are, but we’ve also had a handful of accounts that are almost certainly scams. Our moderators are working with contacts who can vouch for validated individuals, but this is onerous and not foolproof. Regarding the account you mentioned earlier, this has already been validated with us and we’ve put a note on the account to confirm.

@nekoplanet @aral Not blocked at our end!

@kims Thanks for your support! And that's a good point, I should suggest that to Ko-Fi!

@seanbala 🤣

@tokyo_0 I wonder if authorized fetch might help with that…

@tokyo_0 Oh, I was searching on mas.to, not Google. Senior moment!

@tokyo_0 When I search for your username (text only, 'tokyo_0'), it comes up with both your user and a number of mentions from various other instances!

@tokyo_0 Will be interesting to see if it resolves itself or if the issue persists.

@tokyo_0 Seems to be specific to GNUSocial?

@tokyo_0 Really strange! I know there have been some issues with Firefox. Is there anything unusual about your network setup, for example are you using a VPN?

@tokyo_0 Not aware of any issues here. Are you using an app, or the web interface in your browser?

@tokyo_0 Definitely thought of that approach too, the only thing is I thought it might be a little messy. But an option!

HI THERE EVERYONE!

mas.to is and always will be a free service, but it costs LOTS of money to run.

We've recently moved to a new image hosting service which should give us much better performance when loading images, but we had some unexpected (and significant) costs when migrating our terabytes of existing images over to them. Donations are more important than ever!

If you'd like to donate, you can do so easily by card/Paypal via Ko-Fi:

https://ko-fi.com/trumpet

Thank you! 🙂 ❤️

@pidgeon_pete I understand this will be a red line for some people but we do have a huge number of users who will feel cut off from Threads. We will however moderate content on Threads in exactly the same way as any other server. If we see content on there that warrants it then we wouldn’t hesitate to suspend again.

A THREAD ON THREADS!

I’m receiving lots of questions about our position on federation with Threads and realised I haven’t posted on this subject for a while.

We have lots of users who do want to federate with Threads, and lots of users who don’t. It’s my job to find a good solution that works for everyone.

Our position has always been to start from a defensive stance due to our technical and moderation concerns.

So what sort of solution do we think might keep (almost) everyone happy?

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@tokyo_0 What I posted is a proposal that I think might be the best compromise to protect those who don't want to interact with Threads, while allowing those who do the ability to connect. Still looking into the technical aspects of it.

@tokyo_0 Thread here: https://mas.to/@trumpet/112212159528724033

@madargon @tokyo_0 @pinkdrunkenelephants Hello there! mas.to still currently blocks Threads. We’ve posted about how we could theoretically move to limiting with Authorized Fetch enabled and per-user blocks in place, but we haven’t changed anything so far.