Notices by Velocirooster adminensis :bc: (theropologist@beige.party)

*tap* *tap* *tap* Is this thing on?

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers :bc:

And we are back! I have completed my database maintenance and we are now on the latest version of Mastodon. I still have some more work to do on the database, but I can do that at a later date. I think that was plenty of downtime for one evening.

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

*slaps side of plane* This bad boy can fit so many emoluments in it

Air Travel: For when you absolutely positively must step in pee pee

I get it, Hergé, I got a little too into nuclear reactors once too...

A stable economy? In this economy??

I've been experimenting with enabling translation on my instance and since I've seen zero documentation about how to configure LibreTranslate with a purchased api key, I'm going to share my findings here.

Pretty much every guide out there for enabling translation on a Mastodon instance using LibreTranslate assumes that you are going to be setting up the LibreTranslate server yourself. That's admirable, but translation is pretty resource-intensive. When I tested this on my instance, it was taking about 2 seconds to translate a post, and even longer for longer posts. Plus there were some languages that weren't working at all. That was probably on me for not setting up the language packs correctly. Maybe I'll give it another try, but somewhere in the middle of wrestling with the translation server, I realized that I'm here to run a Mastodon instance, not a LibreTranslate instance, so I went and purchased an api key from LibreTranslate for their lower tier of $29 a month (good for 80 translations per minute). Based on the average donations we get each month, that seemed a reasonable cost that we could afford. The trouble was, configuring the instance to use the api key didn't seem to be working at all.

Now if you go to https://libretranslate.com it lets you play around with the api and shows what the post request and the subsequent response looks like. In the post request and in the api documentation, the endpoint for the translation service is:

https://libretranslate.com/translate

but if you set LIBRE_TRANSLATE_ENDPOINT to that value in your .env.production file, it won't work. After a bunch of googling and experimentation, I finally went and looked at the pull request for this feature on GitHub. And that's where I saw that in the code for the post request it takes the configured LIBRE_TRANSLATE_ENDPOINT value and then adds the "/translate" at the end of it.

Even though I was sure I had tried this before, I set LIBRE_TRANSLATE_ENDPOINT to:

https://libretranslate.com

Without the "/translate" on the end. I restarted the web service and cleared the cache and it started working perfectly.

It'd be nice if any of this was actually documented somewhere.

#mastoadmins #libretranslate

Oh hi! I was Just thinking about what part of the country I should move to based on which coalition nation I'd rather be occupied by when this shitshow inevitably reaches its logical conclusion.

How are you doing?

In Oregon I might get lucky and get occupied by Canada, but it could just as easily be China or Russia...

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

In the past month there have been two incidents that I'm aware of where the web server was hanging and the site was unresponsive for several minutes. One of those seemed to resolve on its own eventually; the other I happened to notice as it was occurring and resolved once I gave the web server a hard reboot. It's possible that this has happened more than twice and I just haven't noticed it.

Looking at the logs I'm not seeing anything specifically failing, so I think what's happening is that occasionally traffic spikes are overwhelming the system resources. If left alone, the server can eventually recover but it will remain unresponsive until it does.

We have grown a lot in the last two years so this isn't totally surprising. I have scaled up the web server from time to time in order to account for the processing demands of increased traffic, but I'm reaching the limits of what I can do with a single server.

So, what I'm planning to do is spin up an additional web server and put them both behind a load balancer. This has a few advantages. If one server is overtaxed then traffic can be shifted to the other. It also means that for simple server updates (ones that don't involve database schema changes), I can take one down to run the update while the other stays up. In other words, in most cases I won't have to take the entire site down to do server maintenance.

This all sounds great, but as usual I have no idea what I'm doing. So I'm going to move slowly to set things up in the background and make sure I'm 100% certain everything is going to work before I push it live. Until I have this new solution in place it's possible things could be a little bumpy. So far the server hanging has been an intermittent issue, which is why I want to take care of it now, before it becomes a bigger problem.

As always, thank you for bearing with me!

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

Wait, so you're telling me the powerful elites got behind some nutjob that they thought they could control only to find out that they in fact can't? If only there were some kind of historical precedent that could have warned them of this possibility.

FUCK

I was too tired to deal with this shit in 2016. I am way beyond too tired now.

The trees are acting falsely demure today, blushing daintily here and there. They have plans but are in no hurry to get to them. They stand on the side of the road, waving coyly. Oh hello, I didn't see you there. Nothing really, just taking my air. It is really a lovely day isn't it? Don't you just love the sun beating relentlessly upon your person? Doesn't it make you feel sticky and alive? Oh, this old thing? I just found it lying around the underbrush and threw it on for a splash of color. Oh really, you're too kind. Don't mind her, she doesn't say much. She's a cell phone tower.

@SymTrkl @Alice @RickiTarr This is beautiful and it's the exact reason I started this instance. Humor is not superfluous or unserious. It's how we process the inherent absurdity of the world around us. It's even more important when things are bad and there's no way to make it better by trying to rationalize it. Even from an evolutionary perspective the theory is that it developed as a way to process cognitive dissonance in a way that was non-threatening and reinforced social bonds. We all need a place to get real weird with it sometimes.

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

I have to complete my self evaluation today and I really just want to write, "This year I did work and you compensated me for it, as per our agreement."

Them: We're forcing you to go back into the office because we believe work is more meaningful when employees are together and have a shared sense of comradery.

Me: So, unionize?

Them: No, not like that.

I'm in a ridiculous meeting about end-of-year performance evaluations and all the presenters are infected with corporate-speak so they are insisting on calling managers "people leaders" but all I can hear is "people eaters"

Ha but now custom emojis appear to be broken ⁉️

I did a hard reboot of the web server and that seems to have fixed it 🤷