dw_maintenance | Offsite status page

Good to know!

Any reasons to choice Bluesky instead of Twitter (excuse me, "X")?

The deterioriation of Trust and Safety measures on Xwitter causing all kinds of awful content to show up recommended next to posts, mostly.

Got it!

Just created account on Bluesky.

Posts on X/twitter are no longer readable by people not logged in on that site unless they have a URL to the particular tweet, and even then they can see only the one tweet, not the thread. One can't go check the dreamwidth account there and see the latest posts anymore.

(It's also actively hostile to firefox tracking protection, so I haven't even tried in a while -- it may be different/worse now.)

Ugh, I'd forgotten that they'd done that, even! Yeah, we've been looking for an alternate solution for a while but it hasn't been a strong priority because (*knock wood*) it's been a good long time since we had a "site's completely broken and nobody can reach it to even update

dw_maintenance" incident and a bunch of changes to our infrastructure means that it's way less likely for those to happen. It's been in the back of my head for a while, but for a while there really was no good replacement that fit all the criteria for a "quick and dirty offsite status system" without us paying loads of money for something that was vastly overengineered for our purposes, so it kept falling off my stack. Bluesky switching to open registration and open account visibility had them as my top candidate but I never got around to it; the conversations I've had with their dev team about their infrastructure and build and the way they've shown this week they could handle a massive influx of traffic from Brazilian users who are now blocked from Xwitter, finally pushed me over the "oh yeah I was gonna do that, wasn't I" threshold.

God point about Brazilian users load!

I see. Thank you!

Yay! Most of Twitter seems to be migrating to Bluesky anyway so this is a good base

Thank you! By the wsy, I just went to read a story, and got a 505 down for maintenance page.

Error 505 is a really weird error to get - are you sure it wasn't a 500? Sometimes you'll see those when traffic is high; our auto-scaling system will fix it within 2-3 minutes and you can try again.

Have you also considered adding SquidgeWorld, which uses AO3 source code, to the username shortcuts?

I think we might have an issue open to add that; I'll check and if not I'll go ahead and log one when I get a second.

+1 Adding my vote to this suggestion! I switched from AO3 to SQW a while ago and it'd be so much easier if we could use the username shortcuts over here.

Thank you!

Followed. I don't use Bluesky for anything, but at least I do have an account there. Thank you for not using Xitter any more. Do let us know when you have a Mastodon presence, and I'll be glad to follow again and promote there. :)

The issue with using Mastodon for an offsite status page is that it's hard to find an individual instance with a strong record of uptime -- the purpose of using a microblogging site as an offsite status page is not necessarily to reach the users of the service itself, it's because it's incredibly quick and easy to update during an outage, and the easier you make it to update during an outage, the more likely you are to actually do it. So for an offsite status page you want

1. a service with a really strong uptime record
2. that has memorable and easy to reach URLs
3. that allows outside people to view posts without an account
4. that shows the most recent posts first
5. and doesn't hide posts or require a few clicks to see them
6. and is as easy as possible for the person who's working on fixing the busted shit to update really really fast

Mastodon instances fail 1 and 2, Xwitter now fails 3 and 4, Facebook fails 4, 5, and 6, etc, etc, etc. Up until recentlyish, Bluesky failed 3 (and is still a little iffy on 2, but we did our best) but they changed that, and I'm satisfied enough with their uptime record now that it crossed my "okay, make the switch" threshold.

There is a bridge service that bridges posts from Bluesky to Mastodon if your instance admin hasn't blocked it! But this isn't a thing where we're going to be posting regularly or anything: it's just a location for "yeah, we know shit's broken, we're working on it" announcements if we or you can't reach

dw_maintenance to see them.

mastodon.social's uptime is as good as anywhere else's, but if you wanted to set up your own instance, the uptime would be up to you, of course.

(My instance's uptime is excellent. For example. ^_^)

But!

If you follow @ ap.brid.gy on Bluesky, that will opt you in to the Bluesky-Federation bridge, letting Mastodon (and all other Federated system users) follow you from their accounts.

Edited 2024-09-05 06:23 (UTC)

I agree about Mastodon.Social's uptime 😊

However, when new users join Mastodon, they tend to join Mastodon.Social and it slows the instance immensely.

e.g. recently, Brazil blocked Twitter/X and so there was a huge influx of Brazilian newbies, which slowed the instance to the point of stopping. It was only for 3 days though.

I'd love Dreamwidth to have a Mastodon instance though! It's a wonderful place, it feels like the rebels fighting the Empire.

Plus mastodon.social has become a spam factory, which also probably slows the instance down.

It's pretty popular on other instance blocklists for that same reason, I think, which is also a problem with the 'picking an instance' issue.

I didn't find picking an instance to be a problem. I'm still with the instance I started with almost two years ago, but it's a pretty tiny one and well-moderated. Other folks I know have had to move around, but their moves seem to have gone pretty easily.

I haven't noticed the spam, I'm on Mastodon.Social but then again I have my profile locked, maybe that's what saves me.

I keep meaning to move instance but I'm not sure which to choose. I really must get round to it. I've got friends on other instances, I suppose I should choose one of theirs...

Spam accounts from that instance show up daily on conversation threads that I see. Not as bad as the Nazis that show up from other infamous instances, but still, a little annoying.

I ended up going with a local instance, but other friends have gone with other instances for various reasons (hobbies, communities, etc.). For what it's worth, I hear beige.party is pretty good. And if you're a writer, wandering.shop is another good one.

Oh really, I had no idea! I live in my own little world, I think locking my account keeps a lot of that spam out.

I have friends on beige.party and mstdn.social - those do seem good. One day I'll get my act together and change.

Locking your account definitely helps. :)

It does indeed 😊

I did that on (dare I mention it) _Twitter and it helped there so I learned my lesson.

Yesss, please bridge the account. I spend so much more time on fedi and the cozy fandom instance I'm on hasn't blocked it.

I did go ahead and follow the bridge account, but as the owner of the bridge account notes, it's vulnerable to backlog during periods of high usage. You should probably bookmark the canonical location so you have it available to check if you can't reach the site!

If we set up our own instance it would be down when the site is down, and thus useless for the purpose of an offsite status page. We are also not taking on the additional T&S burden of running a Mastodon instance: Mastodon's T&S tools are woefully inadequate.

(Here's info on that:

https://fed.brid.gy/docs#bluesky-edits

)

denise, TBH, I don’t think bsky.app/profile/dreamwidth.org is in any way more “memorable and easy to reach” than, say, mastodon.social/@dreamwidth 🤷

Please reread the comment you are replying to, where I acknowledge that. The uptime record is far more important.

That's a very good list of requirements. Would it help to see what other news and network organizations have done? Here are a few well-known names and their server choices. Looking at these sites, even the smaller ones might be amenable to hosting an account for Dreamwidth notifications.

https://newsie.social/@ProPublica
https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot and https://mastodon.social/@netblocks
https://techpolicy.social/@internetsociety

We will not be maintaining more than one service as an offsite notification location; having more than one place to update also drastically decreases the likelihood someone will do it in a crisis.

We are talking "several posts a year" volume here; this is not a "we will be posting every day and it doesn't matter when people see it" volume level like your examples. It's purely an offsite status page for if the site is down and people will need to be able to see it if the site is down. "Good enough" uptime isn't for that purpose.

Hurrah! And many thanks.

...is we don't need an account to read the info

Good to know! Ty for the update!

Thanks

was mastodon not viable?

I covered it here -- individual Mastodon instances don't have a good enough uptime record to be able to rely on them for offsite "we know things are broken and are looking into it" announcements!

thanks!

I have neither Xitter or Bluesky, so I appreciate you moving the status page over to the more easily accessible site.

(deleted comment)

This! I have a Bluesky account, but I check Mastodon far more often.

Followed, but as the owner of the account notes, it's very backlogged right now because of the influx of new Bluesky accounts from Brazil, so you should probably bookmark the Bluesky version as well. (Again, this is not an account that will be making regular updates: it's a stable offsite location to put "shit's broken, we're working on it" if the site itself is unreachable for us to update

dw_maintenance, so relying on a bridge account to timely relay posts is probably a bad idea!)

(deleted comment)

Thank youuuuu I've been looking for this!

Thanks muchly! Twitter hasn't been readable without an account for ages, so this is really appreciated.

deleted twitter in 2021, thank you for choosing something that's easier to follow via RSS feed <3

Thanks! Following now.

I'm follower #291. Seems to be working.

Tip from a somewhat experienced Bluesky user: You can create a List that contains just the Dreamwidth feed (or Dreamwidth and any other accounts you think belong with it) and pin it to your Home screen, so you can access it quickly if things are looking weird here.

Edited 2024-09-04 23:58 (UTC)

I refused to do twitter/x because they encouraged criminal behavior.
I had linked to you on bluesky
thank you for an alternative!

Word.

Yay! Thank you for this! I can't see X at all anymore, and asking someone with an account to check DW status was more cumbersome than it could be.

Looking forward to being able to @ bluesky accounts when you get the bugs worked out!

Noted and followed, with thanks.

Thanks for the update, and I'm glad to hear you're moving to greener pastures!

On a completely different note, is there a way to submit a user-created mood them to be considered for site-supported? I can't imagine that adding new site-supported mood themes is a high priority even if there is a way for users to submit them, but I've been daydreaming since I started up

moodthemeinayear 😅

I ... don't know if any of us even remember how to make a new site-wide mood theme, lol, but email support@dreamwidth.org when you have a full one and we'll see if we can remember, heh.

Thank you! I think I may start early by emailing to ask what counts as a full one, because I, uh, might have one or two already 😅 Like, the absolute bare minimum number of images required is 15, while the total number of possible images is 132, so there's a bit of in-between wiggle room there!

In any case, this should at least get me/us started in the right direction. (Squeak! My art might be officially used by Dreamwidth perhaps! 🤩)

I think we settled on "we'll take the bare minimum but the more the better" but honestly it's been so long that again, I don't remember! (I'm going to answer that a lot. The last time we really thought about this was 15 years ago, heh.) I'd go with "try to fill it out reasonably well but don't sweat getting every single tiny variation of the super nested ones". We're also mostly looking for small-ish images; I think 30x30px was the upper bounds?

Hilariously we have a wiki page on submission info (http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/Mood_Themes) but not any on site implementation, lol. But I'm sure we could figure out!

Oh yay, thank you! ~~Damn, wish I'd've known that page was there when I first started the community 😂~~

If you want one to practice, I just finished some pixel jellyfish in various colors; most of them are in the range of 40x40 pixels rather than the preferred 30x30, but the blue ones specifically I do have in a smaller size; there are twenty images in each of them, including the base/minimum 15, plus the three second-level moods that have the most derived images (and two just for fun). I could send over the files for any of them, or get started on uploading them myself if that would be easier on your end.

I also have a 100% completed mood theme that's all rats (see icon), though I'd probably want to change Nostalgic and Geeky to something that's not specific fandom references 😅 And Touched I'd probably want to upload one of my alternate finger options as well. Maybe medium brown with a ring splint for that one? Hmm...

I obviously didn't remember that page existed either, so neither of us are doing great, lol.

And you know, I'll just say we can go ahead and ignore the size preferences since we do have smaller themes for people to choose from if they want (and also because the art is adorable and I love them). Once you get them to where you're happy with them, make sure the file names are the mood name, stick them in a zip file that you can upload somewhere, and email support@dreamwidth.org with a link, or if you don't have anywhere to upload the zipfile we can work with a moodtheme that's uploaded to the site. (There are two ways to make a mood theme public and we go with the one that's more work but doesn't involve using your bandwidth for it!)

No worries, you've all had a lot more on your mind with keeping this site running in general, and I can't imagine that anyone has wanted to submit a new mood theme for consideration for some time now ✌

Please excuse me, I need to run around the house while squeeing and waving my arms around for a minutes. *SQUEEEEEEEE~*

Ahem, okay, back now. I'm honestly pretty happy with the jellies as they are now, but if it's going to be official, I think I'll try and get all of the middle-hierarchy moods done at least.

One thing I want to mention is that I've been naming the files as, for example, "BigBlueJelly_Confused42x40", where the first part is so I don't have to worry about how many files I have named "Confused", and the second part is both the specific mood name and the dimensions in pixels (width by height); I remembered having to specify the pixel dimensions when matching images to moods on uploading my fancy rat mood theme, which is why I included that info in the file name. I'm good to rename everything on my end, but if that's not too much extra information, or if you'd find any of it useful, let me know and I'll keep what you're good with 👍

Also, as mentioned, I do have a smaller version of the blue jellyfish. Example: A small blue pixel art jellyfish beaming, with hearts for eyes

All of them are under the 30x30 pixel limit, as well.

I honestly started out with the smaller version, but just felt like the bigger version looked a little better, so used it for the re-coloring 😂 I'm going to be making the new moods in the smaller format to start out with anyway, so if smaller would be better, it honestly wouldn't be much extra work to just... re-color all the small images as well.

Let me know your thoughts, and I'll get to work!

Edit: ...Image dimensions are literally listed on the View Image listings and I didn't notice until just now. I feel rather silly now.

Edited 2024-09-06 01:49 (UTC)

I ... do not actually remember the process for mood themes enough to remember what it would make the most sense to name them. Do what's easy for you, we'll figure it out, lol. I think the jellyfish work best at the larger dimensions, so don't try to squeeze them down, we can keep the big ones!

And yeah, I really like the rats as well, if you are willing to make the versions that don't reference specific IP ;)

Sounds good to me!

Okay, I made two new rats (I'm pretty sure that a D20 is not IP-protected), so we should be all good on that front! Next, I'll be trimming down all of the images to get rid of extra space that doesn't need to be there. (The exception being "Lonely", where the extra space is very deliberate.)

One last question, I think: The guide says you need .gif instead of .png for images that use transparency; is that still the case?

Edit: Shoot, I forgot that Creative was based on a meme. Welp, one more rat to re-do, but that's not too much.

Edited 2024-09-06 04:38 (UTC)

I am like 97% sure that "gif instead of png" is out of date but

momijizukamori can confirm that!

Oh wait, did you mean the rats as well? Because I may just explode from joy if that is the case. (Definitely scroll up on the page that I linked with the "Touched" variations, I think you may get a kick out of some of the options for Geeky/Nerdy/Dorky/Nostalgic 😉)

The wiki is full of many mysterious things, much of it kind of out of date at this point XD Some quick poking at the source code suggests that what would be easiest is a zip file of all the images, with the file names being the mood they go to. If you have a github account (or are willing to sign up for a github account), you should be able to create a new issue here and attach the files: https://github.com/dreamwidth/dreamwidth/issues - but if not, my gmail account is the same as my DW username!

(also per your other comment, I was poking at the existing mood themes and at least one of them is png so you're good there)

Yeah, my rats mood theme is entirely PNGs, and I hadn't heard any comments on weirdness, so I thought it was probably fine 👍

I actually emailed Mediafire download links to the Support email address last night, but if either of those other methods would be preferable, I'll see what I can do! I've been all but bouncing off the walls over this since Denise said to go ahead and send over my rats and jellyfish as soon as I had them ready 😂

Mood themes properly named, zipped, and emailed! Thank you very much ^_^

Quick question: The guide says .gif instead of .png for images that use negative space, is that still true? I've been using .png for everything so far, so if it needs to be re-saved as a different file type, I'd like to try and save y'all at least a little bit of work 😉

PNG is prooobably fine? that guide probably hasn't been touched in over a decade lmao (and if it comes to it, I have the power of ImageMagick, heh)

I figured that was probably the case, on both counts 😂 Being pretty sure the guide hadn't been updated recently is actually part of why I thought PNG might be fine now. The internet has changed a good bit since then, not least how ninety percent of everything is run on Chrome these days 🙄

Anyway, I jumped the gun and sent everything in last night as PNGs, because I'm impatient, and also still super stoked at the mere thought of contributing artistically to one of my favorite places on the internet, so I hope everything goes well!

I remember, I think.

Excellent, thanks for the heads up.

Thank you for this!!
PS. I (as user one_beast) got a Error 503 for maintenance page :
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=49141

This can happen during periods of high volume and our auto scaling system will fix it in 2-3 minutes when it happens.

Done!

Offsite status page

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Thanks! One of Bluesky's Benefits

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