When you publish a post on Mastodon, it normally reaches followers on your own instance first. The rest of the fediverse sees it only after another instance pulls it in, usually when someone there follows you or boosts your post. Sometimes a post stays local and never reaches users on other servers, even though you … Read more
When you run a Mastodon instance behind a Cloudflare proxy, federation with other instances can break silently. Mastodon relies on the real IP address of remote servers to verify signatures and enforce rate limits. Cloudflare’s proxy hides the true origin IP and may alter HTTPS headers. This article explains how to configure Mastodon, Nginx, and … Read more
You may want to stop federating with a specific Mastodon instance because it hosts content that violates your server’s rules, such as spam, harassment, or illegal material. Federation is the core feature that allows Mastodon instances to exchange posts and profiles across the fediverse. When you block a remote instance at the server level, your … Read more
Mastodon’s federated search often returns incomplete or unexpected results. Many users search for a specific username, hashtag, or post and find nothing even though the content exists on another instance. This happens because Mastodon’s search engine does not index the entire fediverse. This article explains exactly what the federated search covers, what it deliberately excludes, … Read more
Single-user Mastodon instances are private servers where you run your own account without sharing the instance with other users. These instances can still receive malicious requests from unverified remote servers that pretend to be someone else. Authorized fetch is a security feature that forces all incoming federation requests to carry a valid signature from the … Read more
When the federation queue in Mastodon gets stuck, new posts from other instances stop appearing in your federated timeline. Outgoing messages to remote servers also fail to deliver. This problem is almost always caused by one worker process in Sidekiq that is processing a job that never finishes. This article explains why the queue freezes … Read more
When you publish a post on Mastodon, the server distributes it across the fediverse to your followers on other instances. You may notice that some followers never see your post, even though you sent it successfully from your own server. This happens because federation relies on each remote instance pulling the post from your server, … Read more
You posted a reply on Mastodon, but the original author on another instance cannot see it. This happens because Mastodon uses a pull-based federation model where replies are only delivered to instances that already follow the conversation. If the target instance has not fetched the parent post, your reply remains invisible there. This article explains … Read more
Mastodon supports custom emoji that server administrators can upload for their users. These emoji appear in the emoji picker and can be used in posts, boosts, and replies. However, custom emoji do not automatically appear on other instances when a user includes them in a post. The emoji must be federated from the origin instance … Read more
When Mastodon cannot find a remote user by their full handle, federation breaks. You see errors like “User not found” or “Failed to fetch account” when searching for someone on another instance. This happens because Webfinger lookup, the protocol Mastodon uses to resolve a user’s address into a profile URL, is failing. This article explains … Read more