Hello ,
This is our first in what we plan to be a between 1 and 2 times per year update e-mail for all registered users on Universeodon. The purpose of this e-mail is to provide essential updates on the site which may otherwise be difficult or impossible to inform you of. We are currently introducing additional more frequent ways you can stay updated with what we are doing and will cover that in this e-mail.
You have been sent this e-mail because you are currently a registered user on Universeodon.com and do not show as a suspended account. Unfortunately there is no good way to export usernames and e-mail addresses in a tool we can use elsewhere, or even send e-mails to all users on Mastodon directly so I am aware some folks that may have either moved their accounts or even not fully verified their accounts at that point we performed the export from Mastodon and import to our mailing list software. We will be working to better filter and manage this list going forward or until Mastodon has a native ability to send custom e-mails to our community.
Over July and August of 2023 ownership on Universeodon.com transitioned from Supernovae to myself, Wild1145 (@[email protected]), this has been communicated through a blog post (Which has since been removed due to hosting) though you can still read our blog post from December of last year on the transfer - https://blog.atlas-media.co.uk/2023/12/15/the-mastodonapp-uk-team-takes-on/, announcements on both of our Mastodon accounts as well as announcements within Mastodon, however I appreciate that some folks especially those with less active accounts may have missed this change and to those of you that were not previously aware please do accept my apologies, I've been working for some time on building out this e-mail solution and it took quite a bit more time than I had expected to be able to collate everyone's e-mail addresses with usernames along with a whole host of challenges actually performing the migration.
Universeodon.com has now been fully migrated and shares it's infrastructure with a number of my other projects, mainly MastodonApp.UK which I stood up around the same time Universeodon was stood up, and for the most part have had fairly similar sized communities throughout their histories. We have also resolved all of the known performance issues especially that related to the upload and viewing of media, this was painful and took a lot longer to fix than I had hoped, please do accept my apologies for how long the issue was there for.
I am aware that there were a lot of folks, and statistically you reading this are likely to be one of them, that joined us in November of 2022 and haven't used the site much if at all since. We are looking into a few routes forward to try to make sure those folks that created an account that hasn't been used to post / follow other accounts are able to be fully deleted and the usernames released if this proves to be possible without breaking anything with how we federate with other sites across the fediverse.
In addition I am looking into ways that we can start to send more targeted account inactivity notices to those of you that may have signed up, used the site for a bit and decided it either wasn't for you, that it was too slow during the mass migration or for any other reason decided that you wouldn't like to continue to be active. These notices wouldn't result in any sort of account or data deletion but instead would enable those individuals who may have forgotten they have an account with us to make an informed decision on if they wish to keep their account open or if they would prefer to delete their account.
If you happen to fall into either of the above categories where you created an account and never used it or you've decided Universeodon or Mastodon as a whole just isn't for you Mastodon does support self-service account deletion and I would suggest considering if that may be a good option for your account if you plan never to return to the site as it's generally recognised as good practice. If you need guidance on how to delete your account the Mastodon team have written a short set of instructions here - https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#delete
If you had forgotten all about us but would like to come back and see what we've built since November 2022 you have the option to reset your password through the login page. If you've forgotten the e-mail address you used to sign up, it's the e-mail address you've received this e-mail on. You can find us at https://universeodon.com
With Universeodon and the other projects I look after no longer needing quite the level of compute it once had, and with a notable reduction in financial support compared to it's peak I will be working in the background to modernise and improve our back-end infrastructure. This has already been somewhat started with the changes we've made to how we store our Virtual Machines and Containers behind the scenes allowing us to more rapidly migrate those pieces of infrastructure between our servers. We also have a large task ahead of us to re-install all of our dedicated servers as the version of our hosting platform is not at the latest version and unfortunately there is no obvious upgrade that is risk free. As part of this we will be needing to perform a couple of small outages while we migrate and update configuration before we perform the wipe and re-install of the underlying hosting software. We will be performing this migration in such a way that one of the three servers currently dedicated for application hosting can be retired which will allow us to make some small savings on our monthly expenditure.
I am currently also looking into the possibility of migrating all of our hardware away from leased hardware and instead investing in the physical hardware up front and co-locating this into a data centre. This would come with a number of benefits including simplifying the way I have had to set the system up specifically when it comes to networking, and would allow for a better resilience and high availability setup. If we do adopt this approach it's likely not to happen until the Autumn / Winter of this year and our off-site backup would still be encrypted and stored on infrastructure located in Canada with all of the production application and database servers still residing within the UK As they do today.
We have recently launched a PixelFed instance which is now available for public sign-ups. Our Pixelfed instance is still setup on a very small scale however we believe we've worked through all of the teething issues and we've been able to confirm federation is now working both with other Pixelfed servers as well as Mastodon servers. Pixelfed for those that haven't heard of it is a decentralised federated alternative to Instagram and similar apps, much in the same way that Mastodon is a decentralised and federated alternative to apps such as Twitter. You are able to sign up today over on https://pixelfedapp.uk and I can't wait to see you over there!
Over the coming weeks we would like to bring on a few additional moderators to learn from our existing team and to pick up some of the moderation workload across our two sites. This is the first time we will be looking to bring in moderators from the community rather than from folks that we know through existing connections. If you are interested in being considered and are able to donate a little time on a weekly (ish) basis to help moderate the content across our sites please complete the following form: https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/mBX9UeMX3JClqxZMhDIFbkAmbL+z8Yh1IwJ-iObND64/ Which will allow us to understand both the level of interest and hopefully ensure we select the best individual(s) for helping us going forward.
The wonderful team over at Mastodon have recently posted about some upcoming feature improvements we can expect to see in the next release of Mastodon. The user interface on the website will have a minor refresh and from what I've seen on the nightly builds so far it looks like a nice improvement. There is also improvements to the process when I or my team block another instance which has historically been silent and any relationships that are damaged as a result are done so quietly in the background, going forward once the update is released impacted individuals should now get a notification that they have been impacted.
I would encourage those of you interested in learning more about what the next Mastodon update has in store to check out their excellent blog post here: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/05/trunk-tidbits-april-2024/
In conjunction with this e-mail landing in your inbox you now have the ability to sign up and opt-in for more general news updates and service notifications from us. While this e-mail has been seen as "Essential" due to updates around ownership and account inactivity I know sometimes it's hard to see the latest updates when I post them in Mastodon and would prefer a notified way to get just updates. You can now head to https://listmonk.universeodon.com/subscription/form to opt-in to our general updates and/or service status updates.
This is the first e-mail I've sent of this nature and I would really appreciate any time you can take to provide feedback on this e-mail and it's content. I'm sure this wont' be perfect and I'm sure there will be things I've missed which I intended to share and have neglected to include but I do hope this has provided insight into what I and the team have been working on as well as what we are looking to work on going forward as well as been valuable to you as one of our valued community members. Any feedback you have would be hugely appreciate - https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/lRecPxLH7l1D75gtMPTjj0UQV1YobP1OqrnBk6UM1Rg/
It continues to be my absolute pleasure to host and maintain this community and I sincerely hope that if you are one of the individuals who joined us back in November 2022 and hasn't been super active since that you give us another shot and see the incredible community we have built and that the federated social media sites combined can offer you. If you do come back to see what we're about feel free to write a new introduction and include the #introduction hashtag on your post, Mastodon and a lot of the federated network use Hashtags as a key discovery tool and including relevant hashtags to your posts can be one of the best ways to find like minded individuals and build your own connections on our site and across the sites we connect to.
Thank you for taking the time to read this e-mail and I can't wait for what is to come this year!