Server related questions, support and news

A small bugfix release, check the release notes here - so far, everything seems to be working after the update.

This update comes with some big and welcome changes, the highlight being a complete overhaul of the interface for managing your videos, indluding new options. Check out the news post here, as well as the full changelog here.

Check out the new features over on the AbnormalBeingsTube PeerTube platform! if you notice anything wrong or broken, just leave a comment here or contact me otherwise, and I will look what I can do!

The element interface and the matrix synapse node formerly hosted at https://element.abnormalbeings.space/ and https://matrix.abnormalbeings.space/ respectively have been removed.

The explanation being a simple combination of my own stupidity and inexperience, as well as matrix being not very straightforward to administrate/moderate.

I created and started hosting those with a lack of experience. My naive assumption had been, that I would easily be able to manage users and be notified in the element web interface, whenever new users join on the node. That was not the case - a significant amount of spam users had accumulated, and unlike in PeerTube and Lemmy, I hadn't even noticed until someone messaged me on matrix directly.

Some further research showed me, that current administration/moderation tools for matrix seem to be lackluster and finnicky, and the rooms as well as the node were not really being used anyway. Personally, I see no reason to self-host a node just for myself, that is closed off to users, that was never the plan. So, unless there are some major developments in releases, matrix will be removed from the services on the site.

Currently I am looking into other alternatives, revolt looks promising, being more closely aligned to Discords design philosophies, but a decision has not been made yet (and seeing as besides me, there was only one other sparsely active user in the matrix spaces, it is not a high priority at this moment).

EDIT: Maintenance was succesful, all services should be running as before.

All three Services on abnormalbeings.space (PeerTube/Lemmy/Mastodon) will be down for an indeterminate, but hopefully short time for some maintenance work on the server, at roughly this time and date.

Not quite worthy of a full state of the server update, but important info: lemmy-server has been updated to v0.19.11, so far, no issues have popped up after updating - report any if you find them on matrix or this thread!

Changelog and information here!

Since the last update, there haven't been any sweeping changes, but enough for a report, including one that should put people at ease: Yes, you won't be raw dogging these services no longer, thanks to greater financial security from the donation mentioned in the last update, I was able to start this month's budgeting by booking a separate storage for:

And that is that for the newest state of the server update. Thank you for reading, thank you for using the Fediverse, stay awesome!

EDIT: Turns out, I had forgotten DMARC records, and in a scatterbrained state, of course the first few mails went through when I tested, so I assumed, everything is going well. Testing now seems to indicate Gmail is accepting the automatic mails again - please report if you end up noticing issues.

Gmail has started rejecting mail from my mail server - even though I have definitely set up DKIM and other records properly, and they had been getting accepted there before.

For this reason, please use a different mail provider until further notice, when signing up. As long as volume is manageable, I will try to forward the mail to Gmail addresses by hand myself - but this will always have some delay, and is not guaranteed to continue.

I have started an appeal through their system, after I checked that I indeed should be fulfilling all they need on their checklist for incoming mail.

So, a lot of visible things got done today, and I am at a point, where I think an update makes sense. Also, starting now, I will not create annoncement/update posts for every change, but bundle them in "State of the Website"-posts like this.

BEGINNINGS OF A UNIFIED DESIGN

As you may have noticed, the favicon, icon and banner for the instance have changed, and there are now links to the other two fediverse services in the sidebar:

This is part of creating a more unified design for all three services and the website as a whole. You can also follow the links here:

The one service lacking behind is mastodon - I have not yet been able to easily figure out a way to easily put images via Markdown or otherwise into the frontpage - but eventually, I will find a way. If you know how - feel free to answer the question here, for me and any future people stumbling over Fediverse search results.

As a long-term-goal, creating more unified theming with custom CSS along all three services is what I will be aiming for. That, however, is in the "one day, probably, maybe" phase of things at the moment.

NEW CUSTOM PEERTUBE LANDING PAGE

If you follow the link to the PeerTube instance co-hosted here, you will see, that it no longer defaults to putting you into the "Browse Videos" tab - instead, there is now a custom landing page, with trending videos and recommended channels. There is no thought put into the order of channels, so, if your favourite is appearing further down, that is not me valuing it less.

Some screenshots how it should look like:

NEW OVERALL LANDING PAGE (WARNING: NOT RESOURCE EFFICIENT)

So, I am not good at CSS. Not good at HTML either. Really - not good at other programming languages, really, but maybe more adequate there.

I had been wondering what best to use for a landing page when people visit abnormalbeings.space directly. Then I remembered: One tool I do have some experience with is Godot!

So, behold, if you follow the link in the paragraph above, you should get a first version of a huge flashback to resource inefficient old flash sites (but in HTML5 and Godot, instead):

As of now, there has been no testing of, or optimization for, mobile clients. Also, the legal disclaimer section is empty, as of this post. Really, the landing page should only be reached if you look for it, or as a link in my games (where I will add them later this week, and in any new releases)

Some optimizations should follow eventually, but it isn't the highest priority.

MONEY!!!

I'm trying not to beg too much and create pity-donations, but one reality of my life is, that I am living on subsistence-level disability payments, paying for this server out of pocket. Mind you, that is subsistence-level in a European country with a not-yet-completely-gutted social system, so I will survive, and the server will stay up indefinitely, and any and all of my services/games will always remain free to access.

But any donations are of course always welcome, so I am really happy to announce, that the project got its first one:

Thank you so very much! It is highly appreciated, and will keep me afloat a little more securely! Donations are only possible through Liberapay - I am genuinely not in this for the money, and I don't want to ever lock features behind donation ranks like on Patreon, also, I am all-in on FOSS and the Fediverse. So other platforms will not be added any time soon.

If you want to support me as well, I'd of course be very thankful, just click the link below:

Anyway, that is that for this update - thank you for reading, thank you for using the Fediverse, and here's hoping you'll have a great day!

Concerning the PeerTube platform co-hosted here.

As of now, the index automatically following the publicly registered instances has been removed. There had been several cases of instances promoting conspiracy theories or just outright porn instances being removed by me, to then be autoadded again.

Please report any suspicious instances/videos breaking the rules, if you come across them. From now on, following back platforms that follow the instance remains enabled (easier to manage), but the index is no longer being followed.

In the past days, there have been random crashes of the database, moslty affecting PeerTube and Mastodon. I have tinkered a bit and hopefully found a solution, to recover from such crashes. If you notice something not working, please report it here, on mastodon, or on matrix.

Hello

Check out what was wrong and what was solved here

If you notice anything broken, don't hesitate to post here or in the matrix channel! So far, everything seems to work, though.

Check out the changelog (and AMA announcement) here:

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-03-19_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.10_and_Developer_AMA

There may be temporary outages, but hopefully, it won't break anything 🤞

Feels and looks great, and I think I managed to break nothing along the way. I especially love the new feature to easily browse content from a specific, federated instance.

Check it out if you are interested - if something I overlooked is borked, I am happy for any reports/messages.

Go to https://toots.abnormalbeings.space/ - applications are now open.

Also currently looking into what options there are for a good FOSS system monitor, that doesn't open up any security problems and also doesn't need a login or overcomplicates stuff.

Check out what I had missed in this post, I was so sure I had already checked that one properly, but I must have messed up somewhere else when I did.

As of now, both PeerTube and Lemmy will accept users, as long as they have a valid e-mail-address. This may eventually change, if volume gets too high, or if my life changes, so I can't invest as much time into admin/moderation work.

As of now, the registrations on https://videos.abnormalbeings.space/ are no longer approved manually, but approved by confirming a working e-mail address. That was a journey to get it running. Tomorrow, I will have a look why - despite basically using the same setting values - the same doesn't yet seem to work for Lemmy.