I assume, back to school for teenagers and college students.
Well, it’s finally September. After a month of chaos in July due to a certain Birdsite, things are settling down, but of course, there are a few instance updates.
First, as mentioned before, Elastic Search is finally set up at Sakurajima. For now, it’s possible to search your personal posts, including your favorite posts. You will soon be able to search public toots from users who opted into full-text search once 4.2.0 Beta 3 comes around. You have to opt into search to have your public toots appear in the search results. I will make a tutorial video when this feature is available. See our earlier post for more information.
Aside from that, we are still waiting for the Glitch-Soc fork to merge this feature, which can come at any time.
Since we are running ElasticSearch on a separate server since it’s resource-intensive, our monthly costs rose by $12. I don’t anticipate needing to resize that server at any time. Still, I think this will improve the experience for users.
Lastly, we have received a lot of problematic and SPAM and rule-breaking accounts, 50 in total for this month alone. I think it’s about time to start requiring approvals for new accounts. This means providing the following: Anime/Manga List profiles (MyAnimeList/Kitsu/AniList), a blog/podcast/website/YouTube channel (Japanese media/culture related), social network profiles (if Fediverse, from a non-defederated server), art/writing portfolio (Archive your Own, DeviantArt, Pixiv, etc), and the like.
Of course, I will prioritize creators and Japanese media/Anime bloggers. Suppose they want to migrate from another server to Sakurajima. In that case, they can ask for an invite from me or any of our users since they can generate one. We will place a QR code (an invite link) to our promotional video, as spam bots are unlikely to use an invite to join.
I feel that with open registrations lead to more abandoned accounts that don’t interact with our community. The goal is to have users become an active part of our community and make the local timeline more active. By requiring approvals, we can improve the quality of the users that join our server and reduce any troublemaking and spam accounts that cause trouble. In comparison to Urusai, our local timelines are a bit inactive and I kind of want to improve the engagement here.
Most importantly, this would make growth more manageable. As much as I want more active users on our servers and get it back to around 400 active users, it needs to be sustainable while ensuring safety, protecting the fun vibes and the well-being of the community we built.
If you plan to temporarily take a break from social media, do not delete your account and recreate it later. After September 30th, all users must provide a profile or URL to have their registrations approved. We don’t accept just reasons for this. If you don’t give a link or only provide a reason, we can ask for it in an email or reject your registration. If you plan to take a break, log out and probably put a website block until you are ready to return.
If you are on a different instance and want to move to this server, have a friend who wants to move to Mastodon or create an alt account, do so now. Otherwise, you must wait until a mod or myself approves your account.
As for Moderators, we are recruiting. If you are here for a month, regularly post with a clean record, and want to help, just DM me at @chikorita157@sakurajima.moe. We need two mods at our Firefish Server. Two more mods at the Mastodon server would be nice to increase the effectiveness. The duties are to answer reports (hopefully not too many) and approve account creation requests.
The post September 2023 – Instance Updates (Search, Registrations may Require Approval After September, and Mods Wanted) appeared first on Sakurajima.
Continue reading...