Choosing the right hardware for a Mastodon instance is a balancing act. The three main resources — CPU, RAM, and disk — each handle different parts of the workload, and their importance shifts as your user base grows. Many administrators start with a small virtual server only to find that one resource becomes a bottleneck … Read more
Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol to exchange data between instances. When you post a status, follow a user, or boost a message, Mastodon sends an ActivityPub activity to other servers. This article breaks down how each common Mastodon action translates into an ActivityPub activity type and what fields are included. You will learn the exact … Read more
When you use Mastodon, every action you take—posting, boosting, following—is sent as an ActivityPub message. These messages travel between inbox and outbox endpoints on each server. Understanding how these endpoints work helps you debug federation issues, inspect raw activity flows, and build tools that interact with Mastodon programmatically. This article explains what inbox and outbox … Read more
When a Mastodon post from your instance fails to reach followers on another server, you see no error on your screen. The post publishes locally, but remote users never receive it. This is a federation failure, and it often hides in the background jobs processed by Sidekiq, Mastodon’s task queue system. This article explains how … Read more
When a Mastodon server receives an incoming ActivityPub request from another instance, it must verify that the request truly originated from the claimed actor and was not tampered with in transit. Without this verification, an attacker could forge messages, impersonate users, or inject spam into the federated timeline. Mastodon relies on HTTP Signatures, a standard … Read more
Mastodon uses ActivityPub to communicate between instances. Every message sent to another server must be signed with your private key. Without a valid signature, the receiving server rejects the request as unauthenticated. This article explains the manual process of creating and attaching HTTP signatures to ActivityPub requests for Mastodon federation. Key Takeaways: Manual ActivityPub Signature … Read more
Your Mastodon instance uses cryptographic public keys to sign every message sent to other servers in the fediverse. When those keys expire or leak, you must rotate them to maintain secure federation. However, rotating a public key incorrectly can break communication with thousands of remote instances, causing posts, boosts, and follows to fail silently. This … Read more
Mastodon users often discover that posts from Akkoma fork instances appear broken or fail to load in their federated timeline. This happens because Akkoma and its forks like Pleroma and Honk use a different federation protocol version than Mastodon. This article explains how to adjust your Mastodon server settings and client behavior so federation with … Read more
Mastodon and Sharkey are both part of the ActivityPub-fediverse, but they are not identical software. Mastodon users and Sharkey users often encounter unexpected behavior when interacting across instances. These issues range from missing reactions to broken content warnings. This article explains the key compatibility differences between Mastodon and Sharkey. It covers how federation works between … Read more
You want your Mastodon account to follow users on a GoToSocial instance and have your posts appear in their federated timeline. GoToSocial is a lightweight ActivityPub server that can communicate with Mastodon, but federation is not automatic. This article explains the exact settings and steps required to establish two-way federation between a Mastodon account and … Read more