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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