The fascinating world of #mastoadmin

An interesting side effect of the mass Twitter migration to mastodon is that there has been a range of Systems Administrators who had been running Mastodon instances basically for the fun of it, and out of a spirit of giving, suddenly had to deal with hordes of new users coming onto their servers. This was both a social and technical challenge.

Fosstodon.org had this problem back in April when they jumped from 2000 to 4000 users in a couple of days and they had a good managed hosting provider so they were able to scale up to the demand fairly easily when the new wave hit in November. That wave brought them up from 4000-ish monthly active users to over 50,000 users today. Because they had @hugo@masto.pl and the resources of https://masto.host behind them they were able to scale up pretty easily.

Others, who for many good reasons, decided to run it themselves, ran into serious problems trying to deal with the flood of new users. There’s a bunch of fascinating stories from a whole bunch of different Mastodon instance admins that detail the struggle with trying to keep a service online against an unpredicted onslaught of new users.

Some of these:

@kev@fosstodon.org Kicked it off back in April

@nova@hachyderm.io Has a great post titled leaving the basement

@chad@mstdn.ca Has a great State of the Instance Report.

The lovely thing about these various reports is their dedication to open-ness and transparency, as well as the sheer humanity of these reports. These are community-minded people that set up these servers, telling the story of a really bad week that they had, for a good reason. The difference between these reports and your standard corporate outage reports is night and day.

Also, I’ve never read an outage report in the form of a Dr. Seuss poem like this