A couple of days ago I noticed that videos and GIFs were no longer showing up in posts on my #Mastodon instance. Other images were fine, just not animated attachments to posts. I first noticed this in #Ivory, but quickly confirmed that they wouldn’t show up in a browser window either.

A quick restart of the server didn’t fix the problem. Since I didn’t have the time to dig into it, I left it at that for a few more days.

So Mastodon’s infamous Media Cache for this instance has stabilised and was running fine for the last two-and-a-half months. Still, the extra volume required some monitoring, and it does cost extra; not a lot, but quite a bit when seen in relation to the vServer’s base cost. So I was looking at the Cloud options again.

(for now)

So a week after my Mastodon instance ran out of disk space, and after moving the cache to a separate volume, that volume also filled up completely. Oh well. At least the instance kept on running this time. It just couldn’t, well, cache things any more.

After running just fine for 14 days, my #Mastodon instance stopped working. All it showed was the cute animation of a mastodon banging the keyboard of a computer. My iOS app had also stopped updating my timeline. The server was quite obviously down. What happened?