Following on the heels of my last post about Mastodon, unfortunately it seems I’ve been burned again.
Much like how when I first tried Mastodon a few years ago and the instance I joined just up and vanished without warning, today I tried to log on and found that my account just… didn’t exist anymore?
I tried to log in but my credentials were rejected. I went to look at the status for the site, but there really isn’t a “status” page per se, and other users seemed to be posting just fine – so what had happened?
Well, here’s where the nature of Mastodon works against it – posts are not easily searchable, and there’s no way to contact people (even the admins of an instance) without a Mastodon account. But I was able to view public posts and eventually found that it seems a database migration was in progress… and by the looks of it, had gone wrong.
So now I’m just in limbo, waiting for a public post about the status of the instance. Have all my posts vanished into the ether? Or will they be restored once the glitches from the database migration are complete? I have no idea!
This sort of thing is what led me to consider trying to run an instance on my own – but it just seemed silly (not to mention prohibitively expensive) to run an entire Mastodon instance for just myself. And, really, if that’s what I wanted… isn’t my blog just the same thing?
I’ll continue to wait and see what happens, but suffice to stay, I’m feeling a little char-broiled when it comes to Mastodon at the moment.
Following up on my last post about being burned by Mastodon (again), I ended up re-creating my account with the same name on that server. As more details became known, it seems there was a RAID failure – so my account going missing was at least somewhat understandable. This is part of the risk you take with Mastodon, I suppose – since it is not owned by some big company with tons of resources, sometimes servers go down or crash and you have to wait a while until things are restored.
In this case they are working to restore things from backups, but rebuilding the database takes time and requires them to shut down, so they’ve been doing it bit by bit during quiet times overnight, and are planning to go offline this weekend for a bit to do what will hopefully be the last bit of repairs. With luck, they’ll be able to restore all the lost accounts and content.
On a somewhat related note, though, it turns out that technically my account here on my blog is sort-of like a user on Mastodon (or, at least, within the ActivityPub Fediverse). Which means that Mastodon users could, in theory at least, follow me here @Keith. But I have no idea how well that works; the details of it seem a bit murky. But at least it’s a fall-back, I suppose.
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