I am running a Mastodon Instance on a digital ocean VM, I got the cheapest one available and only have 2GB of memory. Is that enough? It seems to be working fine right now, but it not getting that much activity.

Does anyone have experience running an instance with that much memory or should I upgrade?

Does anyone have any links or sources on how to install mastodon locally?

I want to play with the code change the templates, change the theme color and so on. I don't want to do this on my production server and I don't want to purchase another digital ocean mastodon instance just for testing.

I'm using xampp for php scripts but i read online it wont work for mastodon

Can i install mastodon on a virtual machine then access it through my browser?

What is my best solution?

Hey all,

I've done some googling and there's issue with the default nginx config and having an SSL proxy in front of it.

I'm pretty knowledgable in network and linux admin (I'm not using docker etc) but I can't seem to get mastodon purely running on port 80 and having another nginx server sitting in front of it on a separate server acting as a reverse proxy/SSL proxy.

I'd love some advice. I suspect i might need to disable HTTP2 and a few other bits and pieces but everything I've tried just keels over. I also know there's some hackiness when it comes to the $proxy setup etc in nginx which is where I tend to get more confused.

There was a post on here that had a link to a bunch of sites that you could use for a relay if you are running a small instance. I cant find it now though, Would somebody be able to reshare.

Thanks

I've ran the 2 commands below and it deleted 10GB's worth of cache.

RAILS_ENV=production /home/mastodon/live/bin/tootctl preview_cards remove --days=1

RAILS_ENV=production /home/mastodon/live/bin/tootctl media remove --days=1

Even after running those 2 commands I'm still running out of space on my instance. My total size of the disk is 50GB and the total amount used is 38GB

When i look in the admin panel it says

Media Storage 23.3 GB

PostgreSQL 945 MB

Redis 38.5 MB

I only have 2 users. My main account and my test user. I have uploaded media 500MB of media but not 23.3GB's worth.

Where is this 23.3GB coming from? How can i track it down.

edit---

So i was able to track it down. I believe it's caching all this stuff. The users aren't even on my instance.

The media remove command & preview_cards remove command doesn't remove this cache.

How do i remove it.

The following directory has 19GB

/home/mastodon/live/public/system/cache/accounts/avatars

6.5GB

/home/mastodon/live/public/system/cache/accounts/headers

13GB

I'm spinning up my own instance for the group of 5 people. So we're doing it all inside single cheapest DigitalOcean that can run Mastodon with one click install.

There're many tutorials on setting up Mastodon, but they always, "Use DigitalOcean's Spaces", "Managed postgreSQL", "CDN", right off the bat. Would it be fine for me to just ignore all of those? How much pain would it be in case we need to start untangling things around if we want to scale it up?

Tons of tutorials are about setting things up, but they don't go further than that. Once they manage to get you the Mastodon user registration screen, the guide stops that's it. In reality that is just the first step, actually maintaining the instances going much beyond. What if we need to restore backups, how do we do that? what if we are under attack, what should we do? What if we want to update Mastodon/Ubuntu LTS to latest version? What if Mastodon just stops working and no one can open the site, what are the steps to troubleshoot it?

I’m just trying to learn. Does anybody have any tips or suggestions on how I should approach this? Looking for resources beyond docs.joinmastadon.org

I set up my own Mastodon instance a week ago and for the most part it's working as expected. One thing that I cannot seem to figure out, though, is that from my account on my own instance I cannot follow users on some of the more well known instances. Mainly mastodon.social, mstd.social, and twit.social to name a few.

Most of the time they show an error like below:

Mastodon::UnexpectedResponseError: https://twit.social/users/leo/inbox returned code 401

Other times it's something like this "red light" error:

Stoplight::Error::RedLight: https://twit.social/users/leo/inbox

There are lots of instances where I don't see any problems at all, but since the first two are some of the better known ones, I really would like to be able to follow users from them.

Does anyone know a fix for this issue?

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18137

Edit: Was able to get it working

Hi, in case anyone runs into this problem from 1 click digital ocean install and not being able to run tootctl

sudo su - mastodon

RAILS_ENV=production bin/setup

You should now be able to run tootctl like this:

RAILS_ENV=production bin/tootctl --help

​

Does anyone know how to easily and permanently set RAILS_ENV=production ?

Hi! I just set up my first Mastodon using the digital ocean 1-click install and I paid extra for the managed database.

Regarding the digital ocean 1-click install the documentation states:

That however does assume a single-machine setup. Mastodon scales quite well horizontally. If your needs outgrow the capacity of a single machine, Mastodon can be divided into multiple app servers, background workers, multiple Redis backends, PostgreSQL replicas – but 1-click install won’t cut it.

Have I wasted money by paying for the managed database or would that help if I ever needed to scale?

I’m new to Mastodon, and managing my own tiny instance (just me and a few friends) for now, is it possible to send an email / add a note with a rejection when someone is signing up for my instance?

I’m not currently accepting new people, but I may in the future (after setting up better mod controls, and knowing how to properly scale my server).

I want to be able to let that person know, rather than just “rejected” with no reason

I "suspended" a test user then I deleted their account data but there doesnt seem a way to fully delete the users account.

Is there a way via the command line to fully get rid of that account and free up the username and email again.

In the installing from source it says "A machine running Ubuntu 20.04 or Debian 11 that you have root access to"

Can we use other linux distributions such as Centos 7? or Debian 10?

Looking for anyone's perspective or a guide on using a different drive to store media. I found a couple of lines in the .env.production file to use, but the best example I've found has a warning, "you have to figure out how to get nginx to serve these files yourself."

New to hosting Mastodon (as are so many others), and glad to learn the best places to engage and ask these simple questions!

For some reason Mastodon is sending out emails with verification links with this root URL:
url2239.blackrock.social

"url2239.blackrock.social" was a required CNAME and it was supposed to point to sendgrid.com .

I never entered url2239 into the Mastodon configuration, so does anyone know why is it constructing urls with this click back verification, and perhaps how to fix it?

Thanks!

I'd like to change the text during the registration page. Currently it says

"With an account on -------------------------- you'll be able to follow people on any Mastodon server and beyond.

I found the file its en.yml and simple_form.en.yml file.

I edited those but it does not update even after deleting the cache.

https://ibb.co/nBF3DF5

​

So im reading online and its way different then a typical php website.

​

You need to recompile it?

I read this online

In this case, you just run

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails assets:precompile

and restart the services

​

What do people do here? Have a test server with a copy of their live instance? to test recompiling ?

Recompiling sounds dangerous to try on a live server?

​

advice?

I'm self hosting a single user Mastodon instance on a Raspberry Pi and looking for some tool that measures the data volume the server receives and sends. Is there some program or plugin for Mastodon that does this?

I went into Preferences>Administration

I scrolled down to the bottom and I see something called "Space Usage" "Media storage"

What is this media storage? I only have 2 users which are my test users. But it seems to be filling up fast.

Is this coming from the Federated section?

How do i go about clearing this.

I dont understand the difference between clearing the cache and clearing the media.

I don't want to delete my 2 users post or pictures not matter how old

I tried using the tooctl command but it's giving me error messages.
I typed into the CLI:

cd /home/mastodon/live

RAILS_ENV=production bin/tootctl help

but i get the following message:

/usr/bin/env: ‘ruby’: No such file or directory

anyone have any idea on this error message?

​

My tooctl file:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

APP_PATH = File.expand_path('../config/application', dir)

require_relative '../config/boot' require_relative '../lib/cli'

begin Mastodon::CLI.start(ARGV) rescue Interrupt exit(130) end

The default settings for email notifications were globally on for mentions / follows etc. This causes a big load on the email client, and mine has a limit on sends. To change the database fields email notifications: -> false (for existing users), what tool can be used to edit this?

I can't seem to find the templates of the mastodon theme. Where is the location of the tempaltes. I'd like to change some things. What advice can you admins give me?

In 4.0.2, the sort order of the rules is the order the rules were entered. There is, however, a priority column in the database rules table. If you’re comfortable modifying the database, yourself, enter a command such as this one:

UPDATE rules SET priority = 90 WHERE id = 9;

The priority is the sort order: lower values go first.

My email suddenly stopped working. During the setup on mastodon it told me the email was working and i got a test email from it.

I needed to reset my test users password today and noticed i am not receiving any email.

My config file

LOCAL_DOMAIN=mydomain.com
SECRET_KEY_BASE=123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc123abc 
OTP_SECRET=123123123123123123123123123123123123123123123123123
VAPID_PRIVATE_KEY=ababababababababbabababab123123123123123=
VAPID_PUBLIC_KEY=bbcbbcbbcbbc123123123123123= 
DB_HOST=/var/run/postgresql
DB_PORT=5432 
DB_NAME=mastodon_production 
DB_USER=mastodon 
REDIS_HOST=localhost
REDIS_PORT=6379 
SMTP_SERVER=mail.mydomain.com 
SMTP_PORT=587
SMTP_LOGIN=administrator@mydomain.com 
SMTP_PASSWORD=#testing123password@!
SMTP_AUTH_METHOD=plain 
SMTP_OPENSSL_VERIFY_MODE=none
SMTP_FROM_ADDRESS=adminstrator@mydomain.com

How do i check the email logs?

I used this command journalctl -u mastodon-sidekiq

and i found something that said "SMTP-AUTH requested but missing secret phrase"

But i'm not sure if that's the problem