Sorry about the blip there folks here on #MastodonAppUK, it is unrelated to the earlier issues on #Universeodon and I think should now be resolved but I'll continue to keep an eye.

We have added freysa.ai to our #FediBlock list here and on #Universeodon following a boat load of AI Generated spam / nonsense.

For the #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon Folks -

We've seen a notable reduction in contributions over the last couple of months, but sadly our operating costs have continued to significantly increase, throughout February our media storage bill went up approx $200USD compared to the month before.

While I can (and will) continue to pick up any costs where they aren't covered by the generous contributions of the community here, if you are in a position where you'd like to contribute a bit of cash towards the running costs it would be always appreciated.

Links for contributing (Ko-Fi can do one-off or monthly, Patreon is monthly).

Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/mastodonappuk
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/universeodon

And apologies, I don't tend to post much on either platform that is "Exclusive" (There are a few bits) so it is entirely to support the running costs of these sites!

Trying out #universeodon because mastodon.social had too much non-english language content in the feed. I like the idea of being a part of a global community, but if I can't read 80% of that's the feed is hard to find content to engage with.

If this server is good enough for @georgetakei then it's probably good enough for me.

Related to all the weirdness, notifications here at #universeodon aren't working on the site, but through Tusky they seem fine.

We've seen a small surge in registrations across both our sites, so welcome to those of you just joining us either on #MastodonAppUK or #Universeodon

If you're coming from Twitter and are looking for a theme / site that looks a bit more similar to what you're used to, the #Elk interface looks similar in a lot of ways and might help ease the move over to these parts of the internet!

MastodonApp's Elk - https://elk.mastodonapp.uk/home

Universeodon's Elk - https://elk.universeodon.com/home

The "Issues" (Most polite way I can think to word it) surrounding Meta and their policy changes continue to grow worse and of deep concern.

Having thought things through for the last few days and following my recent post announcing us limiting them, folks on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon please note:

In 24 hours time I'll be changing the currently enforced limit to a full block of the threads domain breaking any connectivity and relationships between our sites and services.

We are adding threads.net to our #Fediblock list for #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon following further issues with their approach to moderation. I had been hoping with their integration with the fedi they might have taken some lessons from those of us here, apparently they are now going very much the other direction.

For the time being it'll be added as a limit and if things still appear to be problematic or a limit does not appear to suffice in the future we will fully bloc.

"With faith, discipline and selfless devotion to duty, there is nothing worthwhile that you cannot achieve." – Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Celebrating the Legacy of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah

25th December – The birthday of the great leader who gave us the gift of freedom. Let us honor his vision and strive to build a prosperous and united Pakistan.

We have temporarily restricted signups on both #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon following a number of aggressive spam accounts. We're continuing to monitor and see what better options we may have and so far have been able to detect and remove such accounts in a matter of a few mins however this we hope will prevent these accounts signing up and only slightly delaying legitimate signups.

For the #Universeodon issues I'm currently working to provide more detailed updates over on https://status.atlas-media.co.uk as it should be a bit more reliable than folks trying to keep up to date with my posts especially due to the nature of things being a bit broken.

Strongly considering moving away from #universeodon as it's been unstable for weeks now. In addition, I can't verify my website with the rel="me" link, and my lists often don't load.

If I do move, it will likely be back to #mastodon_online, where I started out to begin with.

I'm hoping to complete the re-build of one of our servers tonight which I'm hoping will allow us to spread some of the load that's currently crippling one of our production servers. That server is currently struggling and is hosting both the websites for #Universeodon and #MastodonAppUK as well as the content processing and a whole host of other bits and pieces. I'm really sorry this is taking so long to resolve, life is really busy for me right now so I'm doing this as quickly as I can.

Hey Folks - For those of you that are here on #MastodonAppUK or #Universeodon if you are in a position to be able to financially support the sites, even as a one off contribution, it would be hugely appreciated! I've had some unexpected (and significant) expenses personally so topping up the difference will be a bit more painful!

https://ko-fi.com/mastodonappuk

https://www.patreon.com/universeodon

I'll continue doing what I can to optimise our expenses and reduce costs either way though to minimise the ask.

I'm going to have to monitor it but I'm fairly confident I've now found the (what turned out to be stupid and simple) fault we were having that was causing the intermittent outages and resolved it. There may still be other issues, if it is the issue I think I've fixed I am not sure how it happened in the first place so there may be further issues there I'm not aware of.

Some lovely #GreatSmokeyMpuntains #photography from an Instagram friend, Elizabeth Freligh (aka "Freligh007") on this #FensterFreitag / #WindowFriday . Link to her Instagram account is below.

[My instance of #Universeodon has been sporadically wonky these past few days, so my apologies if you can see but not RT this toot. Please try again until it works.]

#Photograph #ScenicViews #FensterFriday #Tennessee #NorthCarolina #TN #NC #GreatSmokeyMountainsNationalPark

https://www.instagram.com/freligh007?igsh=ZHg3amg5Ym13NTRt

We are continuing to see intermittent issues here on #Universeodon - I do apologise, my intention is to try to figure out exactly what's going wrong this evening and get us back to full health but things are pretty busy and I've had a lot of other things going on. My apologies again to folks that are on the site if you're getting random 502 / 504 errors, it is very much an issue on our end and is something we will get fixed!

We are currently seeing a further major failure to part of our infrastructure which is currently impacting #Universeodon in addition to the previous outage that we are still recovering from. I will do what I can now before I go to bed to at least get things as online as they can and will be looking to fully fix things tomorrow. Apologies again, it's not been a great week for tech and stability!

I'm still working as quickly as possible to get things back up and running here on #Universeodon - Current priority is trying to get the home feeds re-built as well as the other data that was lost due to the corruption of data. Once that's all done we will start to process the content backlog which we're now rapidly building up. For the time being we're effectively cut off from the wider fedi and nothing is being sent or received until I've got other things sorted.