ℹ️ mountains.community ℹ️

I run mountains.social and mountains.photos pretty much alone (supported by a loyal group of donors), which I like a lot. However, this also meant that I had to think about the situation where I would not be able to maintain the instances all of a sudden.

A couple of months ago I asked a fellow experienced Fediverse Admin to cover for me in that case and he was very willing to assist here (I will not disclose the name). He would gain access over all the passwords and documentation, so he could maintain it further, handover the instance or shut it down in case he desires (with the minimum of 3 months notice as written in the Mastodon Covenant that I "signed", so people could migrate to other instances).

Please rest assured that I have no intention to stop maintaining all of a sudden 😅 , but I wanted to inform you for the eventuality.

#MountainsAdmin

ℹ️ mountains.social ℹ️

Nice to see the built-in translation feature is getting used regularly. We are still able to stay in the free plan of the Deepl API. This gives us 500.000 characters per month to translate.

#MountainsAdmin

ℹ️ mountains.photos ℹ️

We still had memory issues in certain cases and since I had optimized everything that I could already, I increased the system just now. We are now running on a CX33 (4 CPU / 8 GB).

#MountainsAdmin

ℹ️ mountains.photos ℹ️

Have tried to optimize the PostgreSQL memory configuration. We'll see if this helps.

#MountainsAdmin

✅ maintenance ✅

All done.

#MountainsAdmin

⚠️ maintenance ⚠️

Somewhere in the next hour I will upgrade mountains.social to version 4.5.2 (just a small bugfix release).

Will also perform some minor maintenance on mountains.photos.

#MountainsAdmin

✅ mountains.photos ✅

Back again.

#MountainsAdmin

⚠️ mountains.photos ⚠️

There is an issue with the Pixelfed instance mountains.photos. Am working with Hetzner to get it fixed.

#MountainsAdmin

ℹ️ balance sheet October ℹ️

Did some accounting.

October balance sheet (and history) also at: https://mountains.community/behind-the-scenes#accounting

#MountainsAdmin

✅ maintenance ✅

All done.

#MountainsAdmin

⚠️ maintenance ⚠️

Tonight at 21:00 CET I will be performing some maintenance on mountains.social. One of this things will be updating to Mastodon version 4.5.1. There most likely will some small downtime involved.

#MountainsAdmin

ℹ️ FakeRelay shut down ℹ️

As previously announced, the maintainer of the FakeRelay has shut it down. We have been using it for more than two years, which brought in rich content. Mountains.social is now better federated than ever, so hopefully you will not really notice it.

Edit: fixed annoying typo.

#MountainsAdmin

✅ maintenance ✅

And there you have it, we are on 4.5. The long awaited quote posting has arrived. Use it responsibly. 😉

Apart from quote posting there are several other improvements. You can find more on them here:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/mastodon-4.5/

#MountainsAdmin

⚠️ maintenance ⚠️

Today at 18:00 CET I will start upgrading mountains.social to version 4.5.0. This will cause some short hiccups around that time, so bare with me.

#MountainsAdmin

Mastodon 4.5 has been released. See above for info about implementation on mountains.social.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.5.0

#MountainsAdmin

✅ mountains.photos ✅

The instance is back again. Seemed to be a memory issue of the PostgreSQL database. Will analyze later.

#MountainsAdmin

⚠️ mountains.photos ⚠️

There seems to be an issue with mountains.photos. Will check.

#MountainsAdmin

ℹ️ Mastodon version 4.5 ℹ️

Mastodon is aiming to release the long awaited version 4.5 somewhere beginning of next week.

Just a info, as I will be traveling next week, I will not upgrade to 4.5 straight away but most likely somewhere in the weekend afterwards.

https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/115458266320828604

#MountainsAdmin

Feedback from Hetzner about the cause:

"an urgent maintenance had to be performed on the Cloud-Servers hostnode."

This is by the way the first outage of a VM in the almost 3 years of running mountains.social. Not bad at all.

#MountainsAdmin

✅ issue resolved ✅

The issue has been resolved and everything is running again.

Downtime was 26 minutes.

https://status.hetzner.com/incident/77ebd08e-2248-4777-87f0-2a738325356c

#MountainsAdmin