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You want to see Pixelfed photo posts directly in your Mastodon home timeline. Pixelfed is a federated image-sharing platform that speaks the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon. This means users on either service can follow each other and exchange content without leaving their preferred app. This article explains how to connect your Mastodon account with … Read more
You want your Mastodon followers to see the books you are reading and the reviews you write on Bookwyrm without manually copying links. Bookwyrm is a decentralized social network for book lovers that uses the same ActivityPub protocol as Mastodon. This article explains how federation between the two platforms works, what content actually syncs, and … Read more
Mastodon and Friendica are both part of the Fediverse but use different underlying software. Mastodon is built on the ActivityPub protocol as a microblogging platform. Friendica supports multiple protocols including ActivityPub, Diaspora, and OStatus. This means cross-federation between the two is possible but not always seamless. This article explains the exact steps to connect accounts … Read more
When you post from WriteFreely, a long-form blogging platform, the content appears differently on Mastodon than it does on WriteFreely itself. Mastodon users see a truncated preview with a link to the full article instead of the complete text. This behavior is by design and stems from how ActivityPub, the underlying protocol, handles content from … Read more
When a Mastodon instance defederates another instance, incoming activities from that instance stop arriving. But the effect on your own server can be subtle, especially if you are not actively monitoring federation logs. One reliable way to detect a defederation is by examining Sidekiq queue patterns. Sidekiq is the background job processor that Mastodon uses … Read more
When your Mastodon instance grows, the federation object cache can consume excessive RAM. This cache stores remote posts, profiles, and media metadata from other instances. Without tuning, it may cause out-of-memory errors or force the server to swap heavily. This article explains what the federation object cache is, why it grows large, and how to … Read more
When you view a remote post in Mastodon, your instance caches a copy. Sometimes that cached copy becomes outdated or fails to load fully, showing a generic error or missing content. This happens because Mastodon fetches remote posts lazily and does not automatically refresh them. This article explains how to force your instance to re-fetch … Read more
When Mastodon instances communicate with each other, they rely on Webfinger lookups to resolve user addresses like user@example.com into local profile data. Each lookup result is cached to reduce network load and speed up subsequent requests. The default cache Time to Live (TTL) controls how long this data stays fresh before the system re-fetches it. … Read more
When your Mastodon server cannot communicate with other instances, content may fail to arrive in federated timelines or direct messages may not reach their destination. These failures are caused by network timeouts, SSL certificate mismatches, protocol version incompatibilities, or remote server rate-limiting. This article explains how to access and interpret federation error logs from the … Read more
When you follow a user on a remote Mastodon instance for the first time, you may notice that their older posts do not immediately appear in your Home timeline. This is not a bug or a missing feature—it is a deliberate design choice to control server load and bandwidth usage. The mechanism that controls how … Read more