New update for the state of abnormalbeings.space available on Lemmy, check it out if you are interested:
A proper backup plan, Mastodon update + learning experience, PeerTube changes, looking for mods - State of abnormalbeings.space
https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/844352

lemmy.abnormalbeings.space25/04/05 A proper backup plan, Mastodon update + learning experience, PeerTube changes, looking for mods - State of abnormalbeings.space - AbnormalLemmingsSince the last update [https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/587275], there
haven’t been any sweeping changes, but enough for a report, including one that
should put people at ease: Yes, you won’t be raw dogging these services no
longer, thanks to greater financial security from the donation mentioned in the
last update, I was able to start this month’s budgeting by booking a separate
storage for: ::: spoiler REGULAR BACKUPS Until now, my backup “plan” was, “I
upload a backup image to a local NAS here at home, that has very old second hand
HDDs, whenever I manage to remember”. That was… not acceptable, really. I will
now have borgbackup running for incremental backups to a separate storage box by
Hetzner (in Germany instead of Finland, for one more degree of separation).
There will be separate, complete, incremental backups daily/weekly/monthly,
starting today. It won’t guarantee data security on the same level as even more
professional services, but I think anyone using this instance or others can rest
a little more easily. ::: :::spoiler MASTODON UPDATE Another thing people can
probably rest a bit more easily about: There was a minor update for mastodon,
which I applied to toots.abnormalbeings.space
[https://toots.abnormalbeings.space/home], bringing it up to date to version
4.3.7. Beyond just quickly giving a heads-up to report any potential issues,
this is noteworthy, because it came with me learning a very important lesson
about environment sanitising, that more experienced folks probably though to be
self-evident. You can check out my learning journey here if you are interested.
[https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/post/804932] Having the opportunity to learn
about what are best practices - one of the Achilles heels of, I wager, not just
me as a self-taught admin - is great, especially if the learning process and
answers can add to the fund of knowledge within the Fediverse! ::: ::: spoiler
PEERTUBE CHANGES Videos.abnormalbeings.space
[https://videos.abnormalbeings.space/home] saw some changes, too. I, sadly, had
to change up the registration process to manually confirming users again, as I
had several accounts registering - sometimes avoiding bans with throwaway mail
addresses - and uploading at best highly suspicious content that I was not able
to moderate due to language barrier, or just videos outright against the rules.
Additionally, I updated the about info, structured it more, removed redundancy
of the rules, clarified moderation policy and added more contaft info. Changes
can be viewed here. [https://videos.abnormalbeings.space/about/instance/home]
There’s also been some changes to the landing page
[https://videos.abnormalbeings.space/home] - now sporting current livestreams,
as well as a separate small section for trending local videos:
[https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/pictrs/image/55afc263-d0ad-4ef2-8af1-3fc71018947f.png]
[https://lemmy.abnormalbeings.space/pictrs/image/6cf5231e-c891-4020-936b-dbd357e795a8.png]
Alongside this, I will now start to weekly rotate the recommended channels list,
rotating the last row into first place, as to make it a fairer system for
channels that ended up at the bottom before. There really is little rhyme or
reason to the way I sorted them, so this seemed like a good compromise to me.
Also, in good news: the amount of accounts on videos.abnormalbeings.space has
ballooned up to 30+ (including 3 accounts created by myself). This is some great
growth, and I am happy to say, that there has been some legitimate content
appearing on there, beyond my silly meme videos and that one trailer for my by
now very old game. Thank you all for putting your trust in me, server resources
still allow for a lot more users! (This goes even more so for Lemmy and
Mastodon, of course). ::: ::: spoiler LOOKING FOR MODS Realising the user growth
on particularly PeerTube, I’d also be very interested in people applying as
volunteer moderators. You’d have to have a local account on at least the service
you want to mod, plus on matrix
[https://matrix.to/#/#abnormalbeings:matrix.abnormalbeings.space] for
behind-the-scenes discussion. Applications are welcome on matrix, in the
Applications channel!
[https://matrix.to/#/#applications:matrix.abnormalbeings.space] Bonus points if
you speak other languages than English and German, which I have covered!
Currently, it would 100% be a volunteer position. Long term, if this project
ends up getting more in donations than the server cost, I’d think it would be
cool to share any excess with an established mod/admin team - but that sentence
right here should be, at this point, treated as “a random thought I am having.”
I can neither promise that amount of donations ever happening, nor promise that
being possible easily whenever it were to happen. ::: And that is that for the
newest state of the server update. Thank you for reading, thank you for using
the Fediverse, stay awesome!