Quick-wiki: Mastodon

January 28, 2022

Last update: 02/2022, Mastodon v3.4.6 from Docker Hub.

This is a quick-wiki for Mastodon, a federated, self-hostable social media software. As the installation was done via docker-compose, it’s more oriented towards it and may see fewer customizations.

Table of Content

Updates
Accounts
Glossary
To do
Quick links

Updates

Read changelog and instructions from GitHub release page.
Now pull down the containers and update version numbers in docker-compose file:

## backup db
docker exec mastodon-db-1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > name_of_the_backup.dump
cd mastodon
sed -i 's/v3.4.5/v3.4.6/g' docker-compose.yml
docker-compose pull
docker-compose up -d

Accounts

Create new account via admin CLI:

docker exec -it mastodon-web-1 sh
tootctl accounts create <USERNAME> --email=<EMAIL>
# a password would be generated for login

Create new account via web UI by visiting /admin/invites

Note: Accounts need manual approval (confirm CTA) via <MASTODON_URL>/admin/accounts as email setup isn’t present.

Delete an account via admin CLI:

docker exec -it mastodon-web-1 sh
tootctl accounts delete <USERNAME>

Direct account deletion isn’t possible via web UI. The account is first suspended and then data is deleted.

Database backup

docker exec mastodon-db-1 pg_dump -Fc -U postgres postgres > db.dump

Regain storage

Steps to delete media older than seven days:

docker exec -it mastodon-web-1 sh
tootctl media remove
tootctl media remove-orphans

Glossary

Web (through Puma) - Short lived HTTP requests.
Streaming API - Streaming API handles long-lived HTTP and WebSockets connections for real time updates.
Background processing (through Sidekiq) - Many tasks are delegated to background processes for quick HTTP requests. Sidekiq handles these. Sidekiq has the following queues - default (local users tasks), push (push content to remote servers), mailers, pull (fetching content from remote servers) and scheduler (cron jobs like log cleanups and refreshing trending hashtags) - in decreasing order of preference.

TODO

Instance emoji’s for tusky client.
Secure mode.
Federation with hidden services.
Full text search.
Video playback in tusky. Latency would be the culprit here.