Mastodon

https://post.lurk.org is a mastodon service. Mastodon is a federated microblogging software that speaks both ActivityPub and OStatus and can thus communicate with other microblogging softwares like GnuSocial, Pleroma, Pump.io etc.

admin resources

Useful pages from the mastodon documentation

• Installing Mastodon the guide is meant for Ubuntu 16.04 but it worked flawlessly on Debian Stretch
• Tuning mastodon performance TODO
• Mastodon admin commands from ruby terminal
• What and how to back up in Mastodon
• Updating to newer versions

Admin community / help

• Mastodon forum some discussions happen here
• Mastodon git issues some happen there

Installation

post.lurk.org followed the mastodon install almost literally since it was one to one applicable on debian stretch. Quite boring really.

This means that mastodon runs as the user mastodon. All the mastodon files live in:

/home/mastodon/live/

Differences are:

• When running the interactive set up the smpt address is set as localhost and the postfix relay takes care of the rest.
• Mastodon-web runs on port 3001 instead of 3000, the changes to this are reflected in the systemd service files and in the nginx virtualhost config

Maintenance

It's a beast that gobbles all the ram. Something to take into account.

For now I've added the mastodon user to a cgroup TODO

Mastodon can be (re)started by:

systemctl stop mastodon-*.service
systemctl start mastodon-web.service
systemctl start mastodon-sidekiq.service
systemctl start mastodon-streaming.service