When I first heard of Mastodon I got really excited. I always hated how Twitter is just there, they don’t really give a wank about racists and bigots openly spewing hate on their platform and now that dickhead Elon Musk bought it so for me that was the proverbial final nail. While I don’t intend to delete my account (the only reason is we’ve basically started talking there with the love of my life) I will stop using the platform for good.

Now Mastodon… It never really kicked off. A few people use it but all the federation and in general understanding the concept requires a bit of effort so most people just try it and leave. Just like me. My instance, Boltcutter Network has been running for about 3 years now but only a handful of people - and mostly people I know personally - registered and even fewer are using it actively. Or were using it.

Because I fucked up.

The other day I had a wild thought and figured it was high time to upgrade the Mastodon version. I haven’t really done anything to it for a good while (the Docker containers were running for 2 years when I shut it off) so I’m not sure why I expected no issues. In any case, I made a backup - took about 3 hours to back all the uploaded images up - and started it. And it didn’t work. Ah well I thought, I’ll just restart the backup. Somehow that broke too. I tried fixing it, running the migrations over and over again but I kept getting errors I couldn’t find solutions on the internet and when I fixed one, there was another. I left it for the day and went on with my day.

Up until this morning. I got really frustrated with it for some reason. I woke up with the master plan: reinstall the whole dedicated server - as it was also about time with absolutely no updates whatsoever for about 2 years - but this time I’ll keep to managing shit via Ansible. I might write another post about that whole gig but long story short, I managed to start a new and hopefully improved Boltcutter Network. Although the backups were lost in a sea of carelessness, the instance is up and running and this time I intend to maintain it like it deserves to be maintained.

If you want to read about Mastodon and federated social networks, you should read this post.

I didn’t set too much fluff up yet, but the rules are clear: fuck off if you’re a bigot. If you like that mentality and curious about signing up, check out https://boltcutter.network.