i was expecting it to have maybe 20 accounts total, but as of today we have 236 total and 110 active accounts according to the about page. (An active account is one that's been logged into within the last 30 days). I thought most people would drop and leave, so it's surprising that about half of everybody is still active to some extent. I don't think I properly comprehend how many people are here, since it feels pretty small to me. I think I base it on the local timeline, which only has people's public posts and no reblogs.

When I started getting a small flood of people I didn't know, I was really nervous about them being random people who would cause trouble, but pretty much everyone has been nice and courteous. I think the other reason why it doesn't feel like a lot of people is because I was expecting moderation to become a nightmare, and being forced to make ban decisions about drama that I wasn't involved in, defederation drama, or similar things like that. however, I've only had a handful of reports on denden users this whole time and as far as I know we've only been defederated from one larger instance so far. (there is nothing I can do about it...)

I do feel nervous having to take care of the server with everyone's connection to the fediverse on it. I'm hosting it on my own server hardware so I can't rely on the protection that a vps would provide, but I do have automatic backups set up in case anything happens. I also do still get nervous about defederation sometimes. But despite all that I've met a lot of cool people through denden+fedi and it's definitely been worth it.

i likea the 🐟
fish are underappreciated like bugs. they are a bit more "popular" than bugs, since people keep them as pets and will hunt+eat them more commonly but i think it makes misinformation about them even more prevalent. like people are willing to see them as mindless & have no ability to process pain to justify the conditions that are normalized for fish. (eg bad husbandry, factory farming, ocean pollution etc)

random fact: did you know fish can populate man-made ponds, isolated from any other water source, without human intervention? some fish eggs can be eaten by birds and survive being passed through digestion. if a bird eats fish eggs or a plant covered in them, they can seed a new pond by pooping the eggs out into it. i don't know if this is common knowledge or not but i was surprised when i learned this, i always knew that this happens with plant seeds but never thought it would work with fish.

I've been using the yunohost command to back up the glitchsoc app regularly. I made a .sh file that I run as a cron job every night at midnight, and then I have a script on my computer that downloads a copy of the most recent backup from it. You can also store it on an external web host. It's best to have multiple copies in different places to prepare for the worst case scenario.

The official mastodon documentation outlines what you need to save, but it doesn't say exactly what commands to run. As long as you are successfully copying these files to somewhere else, and you keep the last 3 backups before deleting any, you're doing great.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/backups/

Here's a guy who posted the script they use, they upload their backups to amazon.

https://nutcroft.com/blog/how-to-backup-a-mastodon-instance/

Their script dumps the database with pg_dump as the mastodon user and uses tar to compress it + the media/other files. It then uses a command specific to amazon to upload the files onto their cloud.

As for fedi admin advice i have a wall of text 4 u:
1. Try not to get too worried about getting defederated by other instances. some servers will defed for literally any reason and not say why. some admins treats their instances blocklist like its their own personal blocklist

1. I can't say for other software, but mastodon hasn't had any devastating problems despite me messing with it. I've only ever had it break after I'd tried to make changes to the theme incorrectly. As long as you aren't dicking around inside the database or deleting random files in the live folder you should be good lol. I haven't had to do any other unplanned maintenance other than update the software when a new feature I want comes out.

2. Actually one bit of maintenance you might want to do is clear the profile cache. In the masto web admin panel you can do basically everything you need to, but the content retention options don't automatically clear out avatars and headers. They ended up taking up like 30 GB of space on the old mastodon before I realized. I do this with the command RAILS_ENV=production bin/tootctl media remove --prune-profiles. To do this you'll need to be cd'd into your mastodon installation folder (for me its /var/www/glitchsoc/live). This will delete avatars and headers from other servers that aren't followed by anyone on the instance.

3. If all of that is nonsense, I'd suggest try flipping through the documentation for your software to be familiar with what its command line tools can do. Also just do it anyway, you might learn something you didn't know you wanted.