Somnius @somnius@merveilles.town

Hey there Merveilles folks! Looks like updating to Hometown was a super smooth process, just needed to merge in the changes from Hometown to here. Now that the changes have been merged in, looks like I can just update that whenever, just like with the other Mastodon upgrades!

I'm planning to update the instance to Hometown this Sunday, April 3, 2022. There should be no downtime. Y'all ready to get the new features? :D

#hometown #merveilles #migration

What a bug! https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/nginx-server-fails-after-certbot-renew/142660/15

My personal websites were breaking because an optional Perl extension in nginx was breaking every time certbot went to renew my SSL cert.

It's bugs like this that make me want to run screaming into the ocean, lord.

Update from this weekend: I got most everything installed on the staging server but I'm having some difficulty actually seeing the page, since the default Mastodon setup relies heavily on having an SSH cert. But since Hometown had a security update recently, this means there should be 0 compatibility issues for us.

Short-term, I'll update us to Mastodon v3.4.6 (most likely tomorrow evening) and then work on forking Hometown to get our changes included—then proceed from there! #theWorkshop

We have FreeBSD installed on a compact little server that can install as many VMs as we like, and the VM I have on it mimicks our DigitalOcean install pretty closely—though not exact, it should be a pretty good tell for how the upgrade will impact us.

Next step is to get Hometown installed on the staging server (it's been a while since I've done a fresh Masto install 👀 that'll take a bit) and then drop in a copy of our database!

I spun up a VM on my home server with the help of one of my partners to make a staging server for Merveilles town! This way, I should be able to verify that Hometown will work properly with our instance database.

I'll keep you lovely folks updated on how that goes, I'll be starting on that this weekend!

#theWorkshop

Hi Merveilles folks: if you've received an email claiming that someone on our instance is a registered sex offender, please disregard this email. The mods and I have looked into it and can definitively confirm the Merveilles member is not the sex offender mentioned in the email.

If any issues do come up or if you have any concerns, please either email us at hello@merveilles.town or use Mastodon's report feature and the mods will take a look. Thank you.

No definite timeline on this, I'm back to work at my day job starting tomorrow, but I'll keep you all updated as I test this!

Next steps:
- Fork current Hometown version and apply Merveilles changes on top of it
- Spin up test server with new Hometown version, then copy over the database from The Town
- If there are no major errors, then I can perform the same migration on production!

One potential hiccup: we are on Mastodon v3.4.1, and Hometown is up to date with Mastodon v3.4.0. There haven't been any major changes between those two versions, but this means it will require some testing on an external server to make sure things go right first before migrating The Town onto it. So! For next steps…

Wow. We got an email like this sent to our domain requesting GDPR information and I'm glad I didn't act on it immediately: https://blog.freeradical.zone/post/ccpa-scam-2021-12/

Not happy with people doing "research" like this.

Got my ears pierced last Friday! Still needs time to heal, for sure, but I'm loving how these studs look. Getting some real nice gender feels 🖤