Sorry for the temporary outage. Seattle had a wind storm and a circuit breaker popped, and a UPS drained. Everything is back up, but we are now making a shopping list to be able to diversify over more breakers and have better alerting from the UPS systems.

We have been suspending a lot of inauthentic bot accounts that post non-stop about conflicts. Many of the accounts are connected with each other. Some start by boosting posts for a while before posting themselves, many were also connected on the blue sky bridge. We are sure there are many still […]

Maintenance window for many DEF CON services coming up Wednesday, March 4, 2026 between 8-10pm Pacific time, PST, America/Los_Angeles, UTC-8. Some time within this 2 hour window, several services may suffer interruptions lasting a total of around 30 minutes within that 2 hour window. Most […]

#mastoadmin reminder if you are running on SSD. Linux has atime enabled by default, so to reduce wear consider turning it off with “zfs set atime=off yourpoolname”

A lot of inauthentic Russian propaganda bots signed up in the last day or so, I think we got them all. Also a trend of emotionally charged anti-Europe news posting bots, suspending them as we discover them. #mastoadmin

Automated Russian propaganda bot accounts will be suspended as they are discovered.

Our #defcon.social .onion service has been fixed and all Tor services working again. It turns out our custom default style used an absolute instead of relative path and it broke rewrite rules, which broke the integrity hash, which broke the instance for Tor users.

Periodically searching for support% in accounts tab from all locations and suspending the fake support accounts helps you get ahead of the problem. #fediadmin

Ω🪬Ω New version (v1.1.0) of #FediAlgo, the customizable timeline algorithm / filtering system for your Mastodon feed, has a toggle switch to allow or disallow the selection of more than one filter option for when you're checking out your favourite hashtags […] [Original post on universeodon.com]

We have turned on FETCH_REPLIES_ENABLED for #defcon.social! Our users should start seeing more and better context around posts they make or interact with. Please let us know if you see a difference!

We have turned on FETCH_REPLIES_ENABLED for #defcon.social! Our users should start seeing more and better context around posts they make or interact with. Please let us know if you see a difference!

"What about free speech?" A common question, often misunderstood. This new IFTAS Connect Library article breaks down what free speech really means (especially in US contexts), how it's often misapplied in moderation debates, and why community boundaries matter. Read it here […]

We have now switched over to the first new 60TB drive, and it is synchronizing from the older 30TB. It will take many days to catch up, but now there is plenty of space going forward. #defcon.social

We had never run “tootctl accounts prune” since #defcon.social came on-line, and it has pruned 110,880 accounts out of our database and storage. “Prune remote accounts that never interacted with local users”

Posting images should be happy again. We continue to free up space by removing remote headers and pruning remote profiles older than 2 years old. Meanwhile the first new 60TB disk will be synchronizing with the older 30TB. Once that is complete we will start the process again with the second […]

We are in the midst of getting ready to migrate our MinIO servers to larger disks 30TB -> 60TB to address unexpectedly running critically low on space. The metadata overhead for all the small files consumed almost 1/3 of all our storage space, and is not reflected in Mastodon statistics! The […]

Problem identified with our storage server, dashboard show 10TB free but disk is full. We are still investigating courses of action: Media clean up to buy time to install bigger disks, and to understand why the dashboard is so far off telling us about disk use. #defcon.social #mastoadmin

Welcome to the recent signups to our #defcon.social Tor .onion address!

Noticing a lot of incomplete accounts all registering from the iu.edu domain, 0 followers, 0 posts, 0 art. Any other instance admin see this pattern from that domain? #fediadmin #fediblock

We have simplified our #defcon.social rules to fit one one page 😂 Nothing has changed, we just condensed and streamlined them.

What is with all of these fake company accounts that keep signing up? Zero posts, zero followers and following, many times in foreign languages for things like spas, woodworking, delivery services, etc. we must delete 5-10 a day. #fediadmin

Just a reminder, defcon.social is also reachable as a .onion site for those that want to participate anonymously. Download the Tor Browser Bundle: https://www.torproject.org/download/ Then visit https://defcon.social and click the purple onion icon in the […] [Original post on defcon.social]

Last-minute maintenance window: If all goes well, expect a 3-5 minute service interruption to defcon.social some time between 7pm-8pm pacific time on Thursday, January 16, 2025. Thanks!

We know about the pending TLS Cert expiration for https://info.defcon.org/ in a few minutes and work is being done to get a replacement. We also know about the pending TLS cert expiration for https://plus.defcon.org/ (in a few hours.) There is no need to let us know about these. Thanks! CC […]

Network maintenance interruption in the window of 7-8pm pacific time on Sunday Dec 29, 2024 should be complete. Service interruption lasted about 3 minutes from around 7:30pm until around 7:33pm. Please let us know if you see issues with DEF CON Services including defcon.social Thanks! cc […]

Hello, we have more network equipment maintenance for DEF CON network... If all goes well, you should expect a 3-5 minute service interruption to most DEF CON services (website, forums, defcon.social, etc.) some time in the windows of December 29, 2024 between 8-9pm pacific time. CC: @TCMBC […]

Planned maintenance (previously announced) between 8-9pm pacific time on aturday, December 14, 2024 is complete. Service interruption for most online DEF CON services lasted around 3 minutes. Please let us know if you see issues since network equipment maintenance was completed. Thanks! CC […]

We have planned maintenance on network equipment that will impact most defcon.org online resources including https://defcon.social ... If all goes well, some time between 7-8pm pacific time on Saturday, December 14, 2024, there will be a 3-5 minute service interruption to most online DEF CON […]

Six new accounts signed up, six new accounts suspended for fake company spam, Thai gambling sites, and the usual mix of bogus SEO activities.

Work in the maintenance window for December 4, 2024 8-9pm pacific time should now be complete. Service interruption should have lasted about 2 minutes. https://defcon.social/ has been upgraded to Mastodon 4.3.2 Please let us know if you notice problems. Thanks! CC: @TCMBC

We have a planned maintenance window for Wednesday, December 4, 2024 between 8-9pm pacific time. If all goes well, the total down-time should be between 5-10 minutes some time within that window. CC: @TCMBC

The tuning work planned for December 2, 2024 between 8-9pm pacific time should now be complete. No other interruptions are planned. If you notice problems, please let us know. Thanks! CC: @TCMBC

✨ Two more communities signed up as a Supporting Instance ✨ Thank you and welcome to @Admin / mastodon.design, and @support from defcon.social. We are so grateful for the support, and the trust you've placed in IFTAS to help promote a safer #fediverse #togetherstronger #givingtuesday

We have a tuning change to apply to one or more services which requires a service restart. If all goes well, some time in the window of Dec 2, 2024 between 8pm-9pm Pacific Time, we will restart services with new settings, and this will result in service interruption lasting from 3-60 seconds […]

No detected problems from the switchover to the new database server! 🎉🍾 It’s a purpose built system with really fast unlimited write endurance SSDs in a mirror. The old server only had room for a single NVMe, so it is nice to get the redundancy.

The maintenance that was planned for today between 8:00pm and 9:00pm is complete, assuming no problems are found: https://defcon.social/@support/113556724348383707 Down-time for https://defcon.social/ was longer than planned due to 2 issues. Please let us know if you see problems. Thanks! […]

Maintenance window planned.... For those of you that find ways to enjoy the time of year that many in the USA calls Thanksgiving Weekend, Happy Thanksgiving! For everyone else, Happy non-Thanksgiving! We have a maintenance window scheduled for Thanksgiving Day (evening) : November 28, 2024 […]

We have a planned maintenance window Saturday November 23, 2024 between 7pm-8pm pacific time for https://defcon.social/ ... If all goes well, the total down-time will be 2 interruptions of less than 5 minutes each within this window.

All of the #defcon Tor @torproject services (relays, onion services for web sites) should be back online after a major OS upgrade and Tor version update.