You can give your Mastodon server its own unique visual identity by adding your own artwork, icons, themes and custom CSS.

You don't have to do all of these things, but each one helps to make your server more distinct and visually appealing. It can instantly get across the intended atmosphere of your server.

https://fedi.tips/how-to-customise-your-mastodon-servers-icons-and-thumbnail

Admins with tech skills might also want to see the article on adding new themes and custom CSS:

https://fedi.tips/customising-your-mastodon-servers-appearance

Spammers have been programmatically creating accounts on Mastodon instances for years. Sometimes they post once and never again, sometimes they post on a schedule. Sometimes they never post, like a waiting botnet.

As Mastodon's anti-spam solutions are effectively nonexistent, most instances in our network require manual approval of new accounts. Up until recently, it was easy to spot a spammer; their join reasons were generic.

ChatGPT spammers have now arrived.

Important Notice

From July 18th indieweb.social will be updating its Community Guidelines.

We want to make indieweb.social a safe place to be, for everyone. To do that, we’ve made the decision to update the indieweb.social Community Guidelines.

This should make it easier for you to report posts and for us to moderate them!

Please boost across indieweb.social and feel free to email indiewebsocial@gmail.com if you have any concerns.

https://pan.rent has been down for the last ~36 hours. Probably, this happened because of an error during an upgrade to Mastodon Glitch 4.4.0. We are back now, running version 4.5.0-alpha ().

Thanks to @victorvandort for dealing with this.

Even though Pan is a tiny volunteer-run instance, so many hours of downtime should never be happening. We are discussing about how to avoid such long outages in the future.

If you're running your own Fediverse server, adding custom emoji can be a lot of fun both for yourself and for your members.

Asking for emoji suggestions can encourage your members to feel part of the server instead of just being anonymous strangers. It can help to enhance the sense of community

For instructions on adding custom emoji to Mastodon servers, see the guide at:

https://fedi.tips/using-custom-emoji-on-your-mastodon-server

Today, alongside our updated Newsmast app, we migrated our 62 Newsmast Curation Accounts to https://channel.org (so you might've seen some down time!)

Whilst this shouldn’t affect your https://newsmast.community curated Channels, if you are a featured contributor you might’ve noticed a new account following you!

If you’re one of those experts, we’re really glad to have you

PeerTube admins running a public server,

There is an option for you to moderate all of the videos your members upload before they are published:

1. Log into your admin account
2. Go to Settings > Basic
3. Scroll down to "Videos" section and tick box "Block new videos automatically"
4. Click "Update configuration" button at bottom of screen

This lets you keep tabs on what your members publish. You can also mark members as trusted if screening isn't needed.

Currently pondering whether to migrate this account to a self-hosted GoToSocial instance.

My main concern is #safety and I see that GoToSocial supports #blocklists

What blocklists do people usually recommend out there?

Mastodon admins (especially single-user servers),

Are you using hashtag relays but not seeing posts from those hashtags in your Home timeline? Also, is your Explore page blank?

There's a video by @fedihost which explains these and what to do about them:

https://video.fedihost.co/w/f3t7ZEiRtXGD8ajArCknh3

TL:DW - For relay tags, you need to also follow the relay hashtags from your account on your server. For Explore being blank, this is due to servers not trusting boost numbers from each other.

If you're running a single user or very small Mastodon server, you might be interested in using Hypebot:

https://codeberg.org/tante/hypebot

Hypebot is bot software that boosts posts to your server that are trending on whichever other servers you select.

(This needs a bit of tech knowledge to set up.)

Fedi Instance Admins: S3 buckets and CDNs. Public buckets with a CDN are simple enough.

Private buckets with signed urls...I understand how they work. Call the S3 API to grab a signed URL for a specific private asset, the URL lives short term. Anyone with that signed url can access it (?).

But doesn't it negate the function of a CDN? Seems like using signed URLs would be much more costly since you can't cache them for very long.

This is an important announcement for all Sharkey instances running on the development branch: Do not pull in the latest Sharkey version (2025.4.2)!! There is a bug with one of the migration that completely and irreversibly unsets (clears) the bios of every account - both local and remote - on the database.

#Sharkey #SharkeyAdmin #FediAdmin

If you're running a public Mastodon server but you have additional features not available on vanilla Mastodon, you might want to tell people about them in your server description. (For example some have higher character limits, more poll options, markdown text formatting etc.)

Whatever your server's extras are, they can be a really good "hook" for people who are trying to find a new home on the Fediverse, and it encourages them to read more about your server.

Are you running a small Mastodon server? Do you want to increase how much of the Fediverse is visible to your server?

Here is a guide to how you can build up connections with the rest of the Fediverse more quickly:

https://fedi.tips/using-relays-to-quickly-expand-a-servers-view-of-the-fediverse

TL:DR - Follow accounts and groups relevant to your server, subscribe to relevant topic-specific relays, install Hypebot, install FediFetcher.

You don't have to do all of these, but each one helps.

Anybody out there in GIS or urbanism or sustainability or transportation planning or any related field interested in taking over this server? I hate to have move again...but the owner is leaving mastodon.

I recently created a small, silly icon emote pack togehter with the community, and I occasionally add more icons to it.

You can use the icons to annoy your Fediverse instance administrators and moderators!

https://ramses.coffee/emotes/sillyicons/.

An alle, die gerne KI / AI / LLM tools (ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.) verwenden oder nur zum Spaß damit herum spielen, bitte nehmt euch die 5 Minuten und lest euch das durch:

https://blog.campact.de/2025/05/ki-randaliert-im-netz-admins-halten-dagegen/

Das ist nicht übertrieben, nicht gelogen, nicht schlecht erfunden. Das ist die Realität, mit der wir (als Admins) tagtäglich kämpfen, die regelmäßig zu Aufwänden (und Ausfällen!) führt.

COLON THREE CAT FACE PRIDE EMOJI PACK!!!

our wonderful cyberpunk.lol co-admin @rachaelspooky has put together yet another super fuckin awesome emoji pack!!!

these and faer other emoji packs are free to download here https://rachael.cafe/emoji/

consider donating to help rachael pay rent and stay housed!!! https://cyberpunk.lol/@rachaelspooky/114541952062212143

full set and more info at https://cyberpunk.lol/@rachaelspooky/114536249071822630