Get On The Blower

Doing some maintenance today, in theory nothing will get interrupted but if you experience any issues maybe give it a few minutes and try again!

We had a fair bit of an outage overnight, which we hope most of you slept through!

Sorry for the inconvenience, it looks like a network change yesterday caused deep offence to one out of our servers, but it decided to dwell on it for a few hours before acting out.

We've reverted the changes and are currently encouraging the server to be more open about its feelings in the future.

@Triskerslake@theblower.au @david@theblower.au this may have been rectified in some config tweaks yesterday. Wasn't able to reproduce that problem at any point, so it may have been old cached data with references to things from the previous version, at a guess.

Sorry about the downtime this afternoon! We started a "small" maintenance task without realising it would block everything for ages.

Well, it's over now!

RE: @geton@theblower.au

We're back online and running v4.5.0, so let's quote this post and see what happens.

@franksting@theblower.au @anne_twain@theblower.au @troberts@theblower.au hey folks, sorry about that we don't usually have notification alerts turned on for this account on many devices so it's easy for mentions to get lost in the occasional flood.

A few things going on in the background, there's a very rare database error that we can't track a root cause for, but the upgrades tonight are a step towards seeing if we can resolve that once and for all.

Currently all we can do is monitor for its occurrence and give it a kick after.

Update: we're done, please carry on with your posting!

Hi folks, expect a little downtime this evening, maybe in the range of about 9-10 hours from this post.

We'll be doing a little database maintenance and if that goes fine we'll roll out Mastodon 4.5.0 after.

Hi friends! The Blower is now running Mastodon 4.4.1. If you use the web interface, you'll be well served by a page reload if you haven't done that recently!

You can read more about what's new in the Mastodon blog post here:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/07/mastodon-4.4

Carry on!

We'll be going offline in about 15-20 minutes, folks. See you on the other side - or maybe still on this side if we roll back to the status quo again!

In about 3-4 hours from this post we're taking another shot at the server migration. The downtime shouldn't be too long, but get your afternoon posts done early just in case.

If the migration goes well, we'll be updating to Mastodon 4.4.1 later tonight.

About to start shutting things down and running backups. See you on the other side!

@dmakovec@theblower.au should be OK, there's another whole test instance already running there so we know all the component bits work.

We can only guess about how it may handle realistic usage by people though, which is half the point of doing this. It'll give us a lot of room to play around and see how it performs.

Probably could have pulled the trigger on this a week ago but we like being cautious. :awesome:

A lot of people have gotten on The Blower in our first week! Our membership has grown 20x in the last 48 hours, so we may have missed some things.

Like so-called Australia, the Fediverse is as fairly white space and has a history of racism. Despite many efforts this is still present.

Please help our newly-expanded moderation team to maintain a safe space by reporting any behaviour that breaches our rules and code of conduct. We take all reports seriously and act decisively when necessary.