News and announcements about the maps & geo Mastodon instance
We've just upgraded to the latest version of Mastodon. See the changelog at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.5.6.
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space
The instance is now hosted on a dedicated infrastructure from OVH consisting of two VPS and a S3 bucket for object storage.
The first server, atlas_1, is hosting Mastodon, Sidekick & an Elasticsearch for full-text search, while the second one, atlas_2, is home for PostgreSQL & Redis. Both are located in France and backed up on a daily basis on servers located in Canada.
We also implemented S3 object storage, relying on a bucket provided by OVH as well and located in France. The bucket is fully replicated on another one in Germany. We've configured Fastly as a CDN in front of the object storage to enable faster access to media.
The migration process took longer than expected, due to configuration issues with media storage. Hugo Gameiro at @mastohost@mastodon.social helped us resolve them, among other things along the process.
If you ever fancy running your own Mastodon instance, https://masto.host is definitely the way to go. All along our three years there, not only was the service impeccable, but Hugo was always available, kind and helpful. Cheers and thanks!
You might experience missing medias on your timeline. To get them back, you need to clear your browser cache as it's probably still trying to load medias from the previous infra. Ctrl + Shift + R usually does the trick. We'll also have to wait for a few days before getting full access to the full-text search functionality. Apart from that, all lights are green.
Say hello to https://Mapstodon.Space, reloaded!
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space
It's migration time!
In order to complete the migration to our new infrastructure, Mapstodon.Space will be offline 4 hours, starting tomorrow Monday Jan. 19 at 1PM UTC.
After using https://masto.host's great services for more than 3 years, with the instance continuing to grow, we felt it was time to fly on our own!
We've set up an infrastructure hosted by OVH in France. There will be few technical or functional changes for now, and users will find the same version of Mastodon, with the optional Elasticsearch-based full-text search feature still enabled.
We already have ideas for the future, but shhh, one thing at a time!
A few final words to thank Hugo from https://masto.host for the quality of his services (which we cannot recommend enough!), his professionalism, as well as his friendliness, and availability for this migration.
Apologies for the interruption, and see you on the other side!
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space
Our instance was down for more than an hour following a large DNS DDoS attack on Alwaysdata, who manages our domain. Sorry for the inconvenience. You can read the attack report here, especially this part:
The attack started at 12:55 CEST and was mitigated at 14:10 CEST. During that period of time, our DNS servers were overloaded, which would cause random DNS issues (timeout, mostly).
The downtime was unusually long as the attack was exceptionally large, more than 10 times the largest we had ever seen. It targeted government websites, which makes us think it may have been done by a state-level or state-sponsored actor. We had to beef up our DNS anti-DDoS toolbox to successfully mitigate it.
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space
The service is back to normal on https://mapstodon.space, way faster than expected.
Thanks @mastohost@mastodon.social for taking care of this, and thanks everyone for your patience!
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space
Mapstodon.Space database will be under maintenance today Thursday May, 22 at:
11 am UTC, 1 pm UTC+2/Paris, 7 am EDT/New York, 4 am PDT/San Francisco, 9 pm AEST/Sydney.
There will be a two hours downtime to migrate the database to a new server that should increase performance.
Sorry for the inconvenience, and best of luck to @mastohost@mastodon.social for the operation!
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space
TL;DR: We are going to upgrade our hosting plan and the monthly bill will increase from €180 to €230. Now's the perfect time to support your favorite instance!
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Our carto Fediverse instance opened its doors in November 2022. For practical reasons, I chose to rely on the great services of @mastohost@mastodon.social, which takes care of server installation and maintenance for a monthly fee. The plan to which we subscribe has been evolving since the beginning, following the progression of the number of users, the database size and the weight of hosted media. Here's a quick graph of the user growth since the beginning:
On January 15, 2024, our 64K statuses (and those of federated instances) occupied 48 Gb of the database. Just over a year later, on January 16, 2025, we had 103K statutes and 57 Gb of database.
We use the Liberapay platform to collect donations to finance the server. We've almost reached our weekly funding target: 44 participants contribute €39/week. Thank you all for your support!
However, the time has come to upgrade our subscription again, as we have exceeded the 60 Gb of storage space allowed in the current plan.
The next plan costs $50 US (€48) more per month, and will therefore increase the monthly bill from €180 to €230 (not including the marginal cost of the domain name). It's a bigger upgrade than usual, which also comes with more extra resources (see here for details of the plans offered by masto.host). We're going to gain 5 extra resources, i.e. 20 processing threads, 20 Gb of database and 200 Gb of additional media storage.
If you appreciate Mapstodon.Space, and you can afford it, please consider supporting it! Even one €/$ a month makes a difference, as the bill is deducted directly from my personal account.
Beyond this call for support, the question of a more sustainable financing and organizational model has been rightly raised for some time. I'm well aware of this, and to move in this direction (as well as to increase the bus factor), I'm writing down some ideas to discuss with those who wish to do so. But that will be the subject of another post on this blog!
Once again, thank you all for your support, and long live Mapstodon.Space!
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space
Mapstodon.Space finally has a blog! This will allow us to share news and announcements about our Fediverse mappy corner in a less restricted way than through Mastodon only.
For the record, Mapstodon.Space was created in November, 2022 by Jeremy Garniaux and officially announced in December on Jeremy's personal blog: Introducing Mapstodon.
As an instance of the great WriteFreely software, this blog in itself is ActivityPub aware. You can read it from the comfort of your Mastodon account if you want – or any other Fediverse service – by following @mapstodon@blog.mapstodon.space. RSS is also available here.
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space