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.

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, 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.

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!

Videos.abnormalbeings.space 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.

There’s also been some changes to the landing page - now sporting current livestreams, as well as a separate small section for trending local videos:

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).

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 for behind-the-scenes discussion. Applications are welcome on matrix, in the Applications channel!

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.