View at Home is a simple Tampermonkey script to make interacting with Mastodon (and probably other Fediverse services) easier. When you open a Mastodon post, it’s not possible to comment or favourite it unless it’s on your own home instance. The usual way of dealing with this is by copying the link into the search box of your own instance and clicking the resulting link.
This script will add a “View at home” button to the top left of the page when you look at a Mastodon site. By clicking on this button, it will search for that page on your own Mastodon instance and then redirect you home so you can comment or favourite it.
When you install it, it will give you dire warnings about the extra capabilities it requires. These are needed to make the search on your home instance, and to save the hostname of your home instance in Local Storage in your browser. Please read through the code to be sure you trust what it is doing, as the permissions are wide-ranging.
The first time you run it, the script will ask for your home Mastodon instance. Enter the hostname, without the protocol in this box, and it will be saved to the browser Local Storage. If you get it wrong, click the “Reset Config” button, and it will show you the same popup.
ChatGPT4 was used to help write this script, with edits and prompts by me when it wasn’t exactly what I wanted.
Pebble, aka t2.social, was a short lived social network like Twitter. Last week they sent out emails to all their users to tell them that the site was shutting down on November 1st. I first came across it thanks to Topgold, but it was always a small site. In a crowded section of the Internet, another Twitter clone would have a tough time competing.
I hadn’t posted much there and wasn’t going to download my data, but this post by Eugen Rochko caught my attention and reminded me to go visit.
If #Pebble was part of the social web, they would have had a network of 1.8M active users, not 1,000, and perhaps wouldn’t have had to shut down.
Eugen Rochko
Maybe it would have survived, but it would have had to be extra special and offer some compelling features to compete with all the “free” Fediverse servers out there. The Activity Pub plugin for WordPress recently hit version 1.0 and was launched on WordPress.com too, so potentially millions of new Fediverse sites are coming online, all of which are on more mature software.
You might not be on Mastodon yet, but your blog could get a torrent of traffic from Mastodon, or other Fediverse network if it’s shared there.
If your website is mentioned there, it might be the “victim” of an inadvertent denial of service attack, as hundreds or thousands of servers request the URL in the 60 seconds or so afterwards. That is precisely what JWZ blogged about last month when his site was taken down by Mastodon servers.
Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops responding.
JWZ has over 8,000 followers. Every time he shares a post on Mastodon, the instances (servers) where those followers live will send a request to his blog to generate a preview. Actually, two requests will be sent:
A request for the wp-json embed for the page.
A request for the page that was shared.
Eventually, he blocked the Mastodon user agent. That stops previews of his website showing up on Mastodon posts, but resolves the problem for his website.
Yesterday morning, I decided to see what effect sharing a link on my Mastodon account would have on my server. My Mastodon account has 1.8K followers. A far cry from the number of followers JWZ has, but still enough to test my server.
I wanted to test several scenarios:
Caching the post before sharing.
Changing Apache configuration.
Sharing without caching on my server.
My server is at Linode. I pay an average of $24/month to run this site and my photoblog is on it too where I share a daily photo + link on Mastodon. It’s not a heavy-duty server that can withstand a huge amount of traffic.
If you’d like to skip the details, my server coped fine with sharing a URL from here to Mastodon. The load average went up for about 20 seconds, topping out at the max for about 5 seconds before things calmed down. It was responsive the whole time. Install a full-page caching plugin like WP Super Cache, Jetpack Boost and WP Rest Cache and your site will probably be fine. Jetpack Boost and the Jetpack Image Accelerator will help when human visitors arrive.
1 minute load average topped out at 1.34 for 5 seconds.
The page was cached by WP Super Cache, but I had set the garbage collection TTL to 60 seconds and I believe it expired halfway through the test, so it had to generate the cache again. Once I adjusted that, and set the TTL to 600 seconds, the second test performed better. The page remained cached throughout:
273 requests for the page embed.
289 requests for the page itself.
1 minute load average topped out at 0.71 for 5 seconds.
The main points of my Apache configuration:
Keep alives are disabled.
5 start servers
Minimum 10 spare servers
When I reduced the start and minimum spare servers to 1, the next test took longer to complete, and the load average rose to 1.24, even on a fully cached page. This was expected as the server didn’t have the spare capacity to deal with the sudden traffic.
After reverting the changes to Apache, I disabled caching on my blog and shared another URL. The load average only rose to 1.12 for a very short time. I was pleased with that. While caching does help, my server could cope with that traffic.
A sample of the user agents used by Mastodon instances hitting my blog for previews
I suspected that there was one hit per Mastodon instance on my site. I checked my logs and was proved right. For all the accounts that follow me on mastodon.social, only one request was made. That does mean the onslaught of requests isn’t as bad as it might be. Instead of 1,800 requests for a page, there were far fewer. I did notice that a Friendica instance requested one of my test URLs several times.
Mastodon and other Fediverse servers will start requesting a preview within a second of you sharing your post on the network. It helps if your server is running some sort of caching.
If you have many Mastodon followers or if you’re worried about a DDoS from Mastodon, the following will help:
Make sure Apache/Nginx has the spare capacity to grow quickly and respond to a sudden torrent of requests.
Use “expert caching” in WP Super Cache which serves the cached page using mod_rewrite. That will mean your blog post is served almost as fast as requesting a text file from the server. No PHP is executed at all.
Install WP Rest Cache as it will soon cache the embed page request.
Install Jetpack and enable the Image Accelerator and Jetpack Boost for human visitors who come later.
This problem has existed for a long time. Popular blogs had the same issue when they published new content and people following their blogs (through RSS feed readers, remember them?) hit the server looking for the new post. At least with Mastodon, you can load the post in a private browser window and cache it before sharing it. I want to write a WP Super Cache add-on plugin that allows the site owner to preload a new post as it’s published. That will ensure the new content is ready for sharing. I haven’t started work on that yet, so don’t ask when it’ll be done. Maybe someone else will beat me to it and claim all the credit!
Before we start, do you know what Mastodon is? It’s sort of like email, where you can send an email from gmail.com to a yahoo.com account, except it looks very like Twitter. This pcmag article is a good introduction to it. Jeff Jarvis wrote a good post too, and Time Magazine interviewed Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon that you should read.
This weekend, a probably sizeable chunk of #IrishTwitter migrated to Mastodon. We’re not the only ones. Twitter has been getting more hateful and acting as an echo chamber for lots of horrible people over the years. The sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, the firing of half the staff, his pronouncements of “free speech” all point towards the site being less regulated, less maintained and less moderated. You can’t deal with complaints if there’s nobody there listening to complaints of harassment or hate.
(No we didn’t)
I don’t doubt that many of us will continue to visit and contribute to whatever Twitter becomes. Over the last few years, most of my interactions there have been publicising my blog posts. All I could see on there was angry tweets from different people, or people who were broadcasting their top ten ways of doing X, Y or Z. Hardly any actual conversation.
So, Mastodon. I woke up early on Saturday morning and discovered there was a #TwitterMigraton to Mastodon. I already had an account on mastodon.social but Irish Twitter was moving to mastodon.ie, and that’s where I went too, creating @donncha@mastodon.ie.
Judging from what I’ve read elsewhere, all mastodon instances are experiencing a HUGE surge in user registrations as people look for an alternative to the stinking sinking ship that is Twitter.
On Saturday, the admins of mastodon.ie ran into performance difficulties as they dealt with the influx of new users. The site slowed down and people couldn’t upload images. Over 6,000 people are on that instance now.
Remember the early days of Twitter?
The admins increased their hosting plan, eventually maxing out at the top tier. To pay for hosting they asked for donations. Right now they have raised over €4100!
How do I add my WordPress blog to Mastodon?
It’s mostly straight forward. Install these two plugins:
The installation instructions are unfortunately not great. After you install both plugins, go to your Profile page (Users->Profile) and scroll right to the end. Down there you will find your profile identifier. It will look like @author@hostname.tld. For this blog that is @donncha, and I have my photoblog at @donncha. Search for those on Mastodon and you will find my two blogs. Please feel free to follow!
When a post is made and shared on Mastodon, it allows others to reply. Those replies to the toot on Mastodon will be sent to your WordPress blog as a comment! That blew my mind when I discovered that!
Troubleshooting
I discovered that running the plugins on a multi-site WordPress install will cause problems. Instead of activating it on the root install, you need to activate it on each one. I presume that’s maybe because the rewrite rules are added on plugin activation, but that’s just a guess.
If you have caching you might want to turn it off, or at the very least disable caching in /.well-known/ as that’s where Mastodon and other services will query your server for updated information.
It can take 10 to 15 minutes before a new post is seen. Be patient!
Why not?
There’s one reason you might not want to do this. Your blog will be on a Fediverse instance by itself. Your blog posts will only show if someone is following it, or you boost the toots on Mastodon, or in the Federated feed. They won’t show in the Local Feed of your Mastodon instance. The best way around this is by careful use of relevant hashtags, but please don’t spam them, or you’ll be blocked.
Alternatives
You can hook your WordPress blog to your account too. I haven’t used them, but I saw two people use these plugins. Those posts will appear in the Local Feed of your Mastodon instance, which is a plus for discoverability.
You can also use IFTTT if your site can’t run plugins, and you have an RSS feed. Some details in this blog post. Thanks Sandy for that link!
I’m very excited about this. Is it too early to say that there’s enough momentum to sustain a #IrishMastodon community? I hope it succeeds.
Edit: George has a guide on his blog explaining how to do the same thing but points out that you need the WebMention plugin to receive replies as comments. I saw replies to my toots appear here as comments, but only if they were direct replies. If I replied to someone who replied to my blog that reply wouldn’t show as a comment, and I just tested that again and WebMention doesn’t change that, unfortunately.
Matthew Thomas has created a remote follow tool called apfollow, with source available. This creates a page where you can follow a Mastodon account by entering your own details in a box and it redirects you to your home server to do the follow. Here’s a link to follow my Mastodon.ie account. It fails for me, but maybe that’s something to do with mastodon.ie settings. I’ll fill out a bug report but it looks promising.
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