Sooo... it took a little bit more time then expected to do the server upgrade due to certain unplanned issues we face, but it's all fixed.

Also, sorry for restarting the mastodon service more than it was probably needed, but we decide to go safely and do mastodon updated in smaller jump instead of trying to do one huge jump.

We're now running the latest version, let us know id there's any issues.

📣 Maintenance 📣

Sadly, we don't have the time to do the maintenance late during the evening, so we're gonna finish the server upgrade we start a couple of days ago.

This should involved a reboot (some minutes of downtime), but otherwise there should not have any major outage out of that.

If everything goes as planned, we don't expect more than an hour of maintenance: 16:45 - 17:45 UTC.

There will be more upgrades in some days to come, but for now this work session is finished!

The first upgrade went well and now we're doing a second one so there will again be brief downtime in the next hour.

There were elements of the upgrade that involved more downtime than expected. We're still working on it. More info to come soon.

We are running an upgrade that requires a reboot. There will be brief downtime in the next hour.

Users may have noticed that our servers were down temporarily this morning. Our tech team is still investigating, but for now it appears to have been a localized network outage, and not related to our servers specifically. We will update if we learn anything different.

@DoomsdaysCW kolektiva currently doesn't enable expanded searching functionalities since a lot of people here didn't want their posts to be more searchable then what they currently are, and want their stuff to stay in their network / community on the server.

That being said, even if we do want to enable that, there would be some discussions to have collectively and also some work to do on our infra before getting there.

@kvuzet Yup, and the new UI seems to be pretty damn cool !

📣 MASTODON UPDATE 📣

We're going to do the migration to mastodon 4.3.0.

Normally, there should not be any issue, let's hope that contrary to the last time there won't be any issue.

@dan_ballard Thanks. We're aware the donate link is broken. We're working on a new solution, but it's proving a bit more complicated than we'd originally hoped. We'll be sure and let people know once it's back up. :)

Apologies for the longer-than-expected downtime today. A combination of previously unknown problems and debugging errors during the upgrade required us to do a physical intervention on our server that couldn't happen until the following day. Thankfully, the problem has now been resolved and we've learned a lot about what we need to do to avoid this kind of situation in the future.

📢 Server upgrade 📢

Hello everyone, we're gonna upgrade the mastodon server operating system.

We'll have to reboot the server, and there might be some mastodon downtime due to database upgrade, but that shouldn't be long unless with hit an issue.

Just a quick update to let our users know that we've enabled Authorized Fetch on Kolektiva.social.

We've taken this small step to help protect our users' data from the coming assimilation of the Fediverse by the surveillance capitalists at Meta/Threads. We will continue to do what we can to prepare for this eventuality, and are happy to hear from other server admins who are taking/recommending additional measures.

If you notice any performance issues, please tag this account and a member of our mod team (where you're more likely to get a quick response).

For more information:
https://fedi.tips/authorized-fetch/

@archiesea @Framasoft There's a couple of reasons for that:

1) when kolektiva first start, the goal was to have an alternative platform for anarchist media collectives that were slowly but surely getting banned and shadow banned from the corporate social media platforms, not necessarily an open platform;

2) when the mastodon instance was launched, people didn't see the need to open kolektiva.media (peertube) registration since you're able to subscribe to an account or channels from mastodon and see the new videos in your timeline;

3) we're pretty tight in terms of storage on the server right now, so even if you don't plan to upload anything, if we open registration and people start to post videos a lot, we're gonna end up with serious issues that won't be easy to manage.

I'd probably be cool to have a more open peertube instance, but we would've to do some radical change on our instance to make it possible. It's not impossible, but it'd need some planning, time, and money.

🖤 Kolektiva Loves PeerTube 🖤

PeerTube is one of Kolektiva's core services, running at kolektiva.media. It is a free and open source alternative to YouTube, developed by the non-profit organization @Framasoft During the end of the year, Framasoft is raising money to finance the future development of Peertube. You can check out the roadmap here: https://joinpeertube.org/news/peertube-future-2024.

PeerTube allows Kolektiva to autonomously distribute video content with the kind of smooth and accessible interface that users expect. If you have some money left this year, you should consider making a donation to fund the future of this important platform: https://framasoft.org/en/#support. If you don't have money to give, we completely understand and we ask instead that you share this post and also visit Framasoft's website (https://framasoft.org/en/) to discover all their free services. We also encourage you to talk about them with your friends and comrades, so more people use these privacy-focused alternatives to the corporate services that only want to make money out of your data.

- Kolektiva's tech collective

All the upgrades are done! 🎉
Kolektiva.media is now running on the latest PeerTube version 6.0.2 :black_sparkling_heart:

📣 kolektiva.media maintenance 🎥

The tech team is going to do some upgrade works on the kolektiva.media (peertube) server.

We may have to reboot the server, but it shouldn't be super long downtime(s).

The maintenance time is planned from 19h30 EST to 22h30 EST. if it extends over this period, we'll update the ETA under this post.

Over the past few years all the major tech companies of the GAFAM have shadow-banned or literally banned most of the collectives using kolektiva.media. Now we've learned that the Turkish state has blocked access to our domain due to "distribution of terrorist propaganda". More than ever, the State, the cops and those in power want to keep revolutionary ideas and counter-information out of the mainstream.

This seemed like a good time to remind people that kolektiva.media is also accessible as an onion service using Tor Browser with the following link :
http://klktv54valq67z2llp6ew7cejyepqgcrnpaf2xhwlq7o64ufk5tb6kid.onion/

If you don't have Tor Browser, you can download it on the Tor Project website:
https://www.torproject.org/download/

If your ISP blocks access to the Tor Project website, you can visit this page for alternative ways to download the Tor Browser :
https://web.archive.org/web/20231107204733/https://gettor.torproject.org/

Furthermore, with all the mainstream social media algorithms showing us almost nothing but ads, you may feel like you're now missing some good anarchist content you were enjoying in the past. If it's the case, you can subscribe to a Peertube channel's RSS feed or also subscribe to the newsletters of different projects to never miss a video.

#anarchism #repression #censorship #tor

@heyjupiter @m Since administering a Mastodon instance is obviously tech work, the term "tech team" is just another term for the admins communicating through the @admin account, just as the moderation team communicate through the @moderation account. There is nothing secret about this, it is explained on our "about" page that @admin is separate from the mod team.

Your comments imply that you have a problem with the choice of individual admins of the instance to remain anonymous. We remind you that there are good reasons for anonymity, especially for those of us running anarchist infrastructure on the internet.

You're also right that we haven't been very responsive to messages. This is because we focus our limited time on doing the necessary tech work. It's not an issue of bureacracy, but of priorities and time management. The moderation team is more focused on communication with users and is more likely to be responsive. This is the situation right now, but probably not permanently, so it wouldn't make sense to have it explained as such on the About page. We're in the process of bringing more people on to the tech team and that may eventually improve the communications capacity of @admin. In the meantime, we ask for your patience and good faith.

Your problem with rate limiting is unusual. We have read that this can happen when many mastodon tabs are open at once, so if this is the case you could try closing some tabs. On our side, the rate limit (300 api calls per 5 minutes) is a default config that set in the Mastodon code.

We encourage you to work on figuring out what aspects of your use of Mastodon may be triggering the rate limiting, since we have not seen any other reports of the problem. If the trigger is a use case that we support and there are no other workarounds possible then we could consider other possible solutions.