#MastoAdmin gripes
I love Mastodon. I really do. And the maintainers don't owe me anything.
Every time I do a big upgrade, though, I find it mentally and emotionally taxing. My fingers literally shake.
If you're on my instance and you wonder why I put off big upgrades, or why I avoid add-ons like ElasticSearch, then well, read these release notes and then report back: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.2.0
The one thing that makes this way easier is the Mastodon Discord. Lots of knowledgeable/helpful people.
#MastoAdmin gripes
I could probably also take this as an opportunity to level up my sysadmin skills. There's a bunch of stuff I could be doing:
- Apparently pg_dump sucks for backups (so slow!). You should use some kind of incremental backup system instead… I tend to avoid extra moving parts, though. PGBouncer is bad enough.
- Chef? Ansible? Puppet? These are all just words to me.
- Or maybe just moving to a hosted provider if this is all too much. Not out of the question.
re: #MastoAdmin gripes
@nolan docker is supposed to make it so that only one person has to do all the hard work of implementing these mastodon upgrades, and for everyone else, it's just a version bump.
I'm sure there is someone out there doing that work for mastodon, whether that could be useful to you as of right now, I don't know.
I think if you want to do incremental backup of a postgres db, the easiest way might be to essentially set up database replication between the prod server and a "backup" machine.
I agree they don't owe you anything, but I also do feel the need to call out whenever I see culture that's actively hostile towards making this kind of software easier to manage, especially for less experienced admins / folks who have less spare time, etc.
I don't know much about what it's like to try to contribute to mastodon on those terms, but based on the current state of their getting started guide, I'm not sure I even want to find out.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/
If I was setting up one of these fediverse instances today, I would probably be skipping mastodon's publications whenever possible and looking for someone who has packaged it w/docker or a similar tool.
