Firstly, the maintenance for Pawb.Social services has been completed and we've upgraded Lemmy to 0.19.6-beta.13, and our Mastodon instances to v4.3.0.

Thanks for your patience.

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and now, onto the "Toastify is awesome" (because it is. Totally.) postmortem:

Short summary: Crash did a stupid with the config and emails weren’t getting sent (oops). Emails should now be working again, and registration shouldn't require admin intervention.

Longer story:

Lemmy has several configuration options that need to be updated to correspond to the specific instance that's running it. For example, here's a snippet of Pawb.Social's config:

{ database: { host: "the.best.db.url.internal" user: "pawbsocial_lemmy" database: "pawbsocial_lemmy" password: "pawbsocial_do_you_really_think_i_would_leak_this" pool_size: 128 } hostname: "pawb.social" pictrs: { url: "http://pawb-social-pictrs:8080/" api_key: "sekrit" } email: { smtp_server: "email-smtp.us-east-2.amazonaws.com:587" smtp_login: "pls_send_emails" smtp_password: "jeff_im_begging_you" smtp_from_address: "Pawb.Social Lemmy <{{domain}}>" tls_type: "starttls" } }

Can you spot the problem? (No, it's not my awful password, or the pleading I'm doing with AWS to send emails so y'all stop having email problems.)

Originally, Lemmy was deployed through docker-compose which uses variable replacement to change something like {{domain}} to pawb.social automatically. Crash swapped away from using docker-compose due to repeated issues with trying to deploy the Lemmy changes and opted for a more bare Docker configuration.

Can you guess what didn’t get changed? …Yeah, the {{domain}} part was never removed and replaced with pawb.social so Lemmy correctly caught the error and threw an exception. The unfortunate part is that the thrown exception caused the whole comment process to close the connection to the web proxy server which returned a 502 Bad Gateway, which gave the UI HTML instead of a JSON response. The response handler in the UI then tried to figure out what was wrong, failed to translate the HTML to JSON, and gave the default error message “Toastify is awesome!” (which it is. Objectively.)

HOPEFULLY. This does fix the issue. I can’t guarantee it, but I’ve been able to replicate it by replying to someone else’s comment (which usually triggers an email notification) and after making the change, it successfully sent off the comment with a happy green confirmation toast.

We've successfully upgraded Lemmy from v0.19.3 to v0.19.5 and have a bunch of changes to share!

Bug Fixes

• Previously users were reporting that the web client kept logging them out. This was suspected to be due to a misconfiguration of the cookie storing the session information and should be fixed.

• Some communities were slow to load. Federation changes in v0.19.4 and v0.19.5 should rectify some federation issues. Additionally, we increased the number of database connections for Lemmy and will gradually increase this if we identify any further slowdowns.

(Longer term, we're planning to upgrade the database hardware which should improve the performance for all services)

Local Only Communities

When creating or editing your communities, you'll now see a "Visibility" option that allows you to choose between "Public" and "Local Only".

The "Public" setting will continue to operate as normal and federate your community to all other instances we federate with.

"Local Only" will disable federation for your community and restrict the community to being viewed by local logged in users only; Logged out users may not be able to see your community until they log in.

Image Proxying

Once we've established that the database is no longer under substantial load and the performance issues previously experienced are fixed, we'll be enabling an image proxying mode which will allow us to locally cache images from remote instances rather than serving them directly.

This will allow us to improve the performance of loading images without applying additional load to other instances, and prevent remote bad actors from trying to scrape IP addresses.

Other changes

There are a handful of other miscellaneous changes that you can view in the full change logs:

• https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements

• https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-19_-Lemmy_Release_v0.19.5-_A_Few_Bugfixes

We’re aware of an issue affecting our Lemmy service (pawb.social) that seems to be causing users to be randomly logged out. We believe we’ve identified the issue thanks to a bug fix in a newer version of the UI code.

We’re needing to verify there are no other breaking changes for the upgrade process, and expect to perform maintenance this Sunday, Sept 22nd at Noon US Mountain Time (https://everytimezone.com/s/7abd4955). We’ll provide an update tomorrow to confirm the maintenance window.

Thank you to everyone who brought this to our attention and we apologize for the inconvenience.

tl;dr summary furry.engineer and pawb.fun will be down for several hours this evening (5 PM Mountain Time onward) as we migrate data from the cloud to local storage. We'll post updates via our announcements channel at https://t.me/pawbsocial.

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In order to reduce costs and expand our storage pool, we'll be migrating data from our existing Cloudflare R2 buckets to local replicated network storage, and from Proxmox-based LXC containers to Kubernetes pods.

Currently, according to Mastodon, we're using about 1 TB of media storage, but according to Cloudflare, we're using near 6 TB. This appears to be due to Cloudflare R2's implementation of the underlying S3 protocol that Mastodon uses for cloud-based media storage, which is preventing Mastodon from properly cleaning up no longer used files.

As part of the move, we'll be creating / using new Docker-based images for Glitch-SOC (the fork of Mastodon we use) and hooking that up to a dedicated set of database nodes and replicated storage through Longhorn. This should allow us to seamlessly move the instances from one Kubernetes node to another for performing routine hardware and system maintenance without taking the instances offline.

We're planning to roll out the changes in several stages:

1. Taking furry.engineer and pawb.fun down for maintenance to prevent additional media being created.

2. Initiating a transfer from R2 to the new local replicated network storage for locally generated user content first, then remote media. (This will happen in parallel to the other stages, so some media may be unavailable until the transfer fully completes).

3. Exporting and re-importing the databases from their LXC containers to the new dedicated database servers.

4. Creating and deploying the new Kubernetes pods, and bringing one of the two instances back online, pointing at the new database and storage.

5. Monitoring for any media-related issues, and bringing the second instance back online.

We'll be beginning the maintenance window at 5 PM Mountain Time (4 PM Pacific Time) and have no ETA at this time. We'll provide updates through our existing Telegram announcements channel at https://t.me/pawbsocial.

During this maintenance window, furry.engineer and pawb.fun will be unavailable until the maintenance concluded. Our Lemmy instance at pawb.social will remain online, though you may experience longer than normal load times due to high network traffic.

----

Finally and most importantly, I want to thank those who have been donating through our Ko-Fi page as this has allowed us to build up a small war chest to make this transfer possible through both new hardware and the inevitable data export fees we'll face bringing content down from Cloudflare R2.

Going forward, we're looking into providing additional fediverse services (such as Pixelfed) and extending our data retention length to allow us to maintain more content for longer, but none of this would be possible if it weren't for your generous donations.

We've updated to Lemmy v0.19.3!

For a full change log, see the updates below:

• v0.19.0
• v0.19.1
• v0.19.2
• v0.19.3

Major changes

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy’s sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don’t get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don’t have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

Currently, we’re running the Ubiquiti Dream Machine directly as the modem via PPPoE, but there appears to be an intermittent issue with the software implementation that results in periodic downtimes of a few minutes while it reconnects.

We’re looking at switching this back out with the ISP provided router in pass through mode to negate the PPPoE connectivity drop.

We don’t expect this to take longer than 1 hour to switch over and test for reliability before bringing the services back up.

We’ll be performing this maintenance around 11 AM US Mountain Time, and will provide updates via the Telegram channel at https://t.me/pawbsocial.

One of the data storage systems (CEPH) encountered a critical failure when Proxmox lost connection to several of its nodes, ultimately resulting in the CEPH configuration being cleared by the Proxmox cluster consensus mechanism. No data, except ElasticSearch, was stored on CEPH.

When the connection was lost to the other nodes, a split-brain occurred (when nodes disagree on which changes are authoritative and which should be dropped). As we tried to recluster all of the nodes, a resolution occured that resulted in the ceph.conf file being wiped and the data on CEPH being unrecoverable.

Thankfully, we’ve suffered no significant data loss, with the exception of having to rebuild the Mastodon ElasticSearch indexes from 6 AM this morning to present.

I’d like to profusely apologize for the inconvenience, but we felt it necessary at the time to offline all services as part of our disaster recovery plan to ensure no damage occurred to the containers while we investigated.

We've migrated all of the Pawb.Social (Lemmy) media from within the container to the new local NAS.

We'll be performing the same updates for pawb.fun and furry.engineer over the course of the next week, minimizing downtime where possible.

We will need to take the services offline once the initial transfer is completed to perform a final check for any new data, and transition to the local NAS, but we'll post an announcement prior to the final maintenance for each instance.

These changes are to allow us longer and cheaper retention of remote and local media across all of our services, and to allow us to begin backing up media in case of a catastrophic failure.

With the upgrade to Mastodon 4.2.0, the way the search system works is changing to allow more broad searches across posts made across the fediverse.

Cutting to the chase: Full-text search across opted-in posts will be possible in the next few days.

----

In more depth, the system will allow you to search across your own posts and posts you've interacted with from others irrespective of their opt-in status for full-text search, but will additionally allow you to search ANY posts made by users that opt-in to allow their posts to be indexed.

To that effect, a new setting was added to the Public Profile > Privacy and Reach page called "Include public posts in search results" which is disabled by default. Turning this on will allow any user across the Fediverse to search and find your posts using full-text search.

Shortcuts:

• furry.engineer users click here
• pawb.fun users click here
• For everyone else: There's Mastercard (Sorry not sorry xD) But, just take your instance's domain and add /settings/privacy to the end (e.g. https://INSTANCE.TLD/settings/privacy)

!

To allow our users to decide if this is a feature they want to use on their posts going forward, we won't be enabling ElasticSearch until Friday Sept. 22.

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Additionally, new keywords will be added to the search system:

• from:me
• before:2022-11-01, after:2022-11-01, during:2022-11-01
• language:fr
• has:poll
• in:library for searching only in posts you have written or interacted with

These will be enabled on Friday along with the rest of the changes to the search system.

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If you've got any questions, please let us know!

EDIT Aug 2, 1:53 PM US Mountain Time: Maintenance has now concluded and all services are back online!

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We're preparing the server rack for an additional Proxmox node to be added to support HA failover and have identified the need to offline and move some equipment around to complete this work.

As such, we'll have a temporary downtime for up to 1 hour from 1 PM US Mountain Time, today August 2nd, or 1 hour from this post. Though, we expect the work to update the node, move it, and bring it back online to take no longer than 30 minutes.

We're hoping these changes will help us maintain a more stable service going forward, spread out the Sidekiq processes (the ones that receive / send data across the Fediverse), and allow us to perform maintenance as necessary without having to offline the service in the future.

We apologize for the short notice as we had hoped to perform this maintenance without any downtime.

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Maintenance window: 1 PM - 2 PM US Mountain Time, August 2nd, 2023

ETA: 30 minutes to 1 hour

During the maintenance window, the following services will be unavailable:

• pawb.fun
• pawb.social
• furry.engineer

We’ll have updates throughout the maintenance window available at https://t.me/pawbsocial.

Around 11:30 PM, one of the core GCFI breakers tripped resulting in the UPS array running until around just after midnight before dropping entirely.

We had not set up monitoring on the APC UPS as we hadn’t anticipated that as a failure point due to the reliability of the Colorado electrical grid, and didn’t anticipate the breaker itself flipping after months of continued use.

All services should be online again and working to catch up on any dropped content overnight, and we apologize again for the inconvenience.

We’ll be trying to identify the root cause throughout the day, working on the electrical connections, and setting up alerting through the APC UPS to detect and persistent A/C loss.

As you may or may not have heard, the latest update to pawb.social saw pawb.fun and furry.engineer updated to use the glitch-soc fork of mastodon! That has given us a bunch of new tools to play with. Including the ability to use markdown in our posts. This post will be a quick howto guide. First, how to even use it in the first place. You will need to click the cog, which will now bring you to this screen:

!

Go to show content-type choice when authoring toots, and turn that on. You will then see a screen that looks similar to this:

!

You can either select plain text to write a post as you're used to, you can use HTML if you know that, or you can use Markdown and take advantage of all of these:

**bold** *italics* _underline_ `single line code`multi line code``` >block quote ^superscript strikeout

h1

h2

h3

h4

h5

1. testing
   • testing
   • unordered
   • list
2. ordered
3. list ``` bold

italics

underline

single line code

multi line code

>block quote

^superscript

strikeout

h1

h2

h3

h4

h5

1. testing
   • testing
   • unordered
   • list
2. ordered
3. list

(NOTE: if you are going to mix and match ordered and unordered lists, indenting is MANDATORY, otherwise the markdown will just assume everything is supposed to be in the same format as the first list item. So if you start with an asterisk, it will assume everything needs a bullet. If you start with 1, it will assume everything is supposed to be ordered.)

Markdown can also support a limited range of HTML tags. One example is as follows: <abbr title="some text">text</abbr>

We will leave that for you to discover however.

And that's pretty much everything! If you trip across another markdown tag that is supported, or find something that might not be accurate, feel free to relay it to us! Reminder this markdown will work ONLY if you specifically select Markdown as a content-type

EDIT Maintenance Complete (7/6 8:41 AM): We’ve finished troubleshooting with the ISP modem (and stumbled onto fixing the issue somehow), so we’ve brought pawb.social back online.

The Mastodon upgrade has completed and we’re now running Mastodon+Glitch 4.1.3!

…What’s Glitch? Glitch-soc is a fork of Mastodon that enables a ton of cool new features, accessibility options, and more!

You’ll see new things like:

• An option under the three-dots when posting on the web UI to: Enable threading, or keep your post entirely local to your instance (We’ll be using this going forward with an announcement bot on both pawb.fun and furry.engineer to avoid spamming the timeline)

• Formatted toots! (You can now use markdown language in your toots!)

• More skins and flavors of the web-UI, including a high contrast version

Let us know if you have any issues!

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Following our previous post about ISP issues, we'll be performing tests on our ISP equipment tomorrow morning (July 6th) from 7 AM US Mountain Time for several hours.

Additionally, we've been made aware of a critical security update for Mastodon that will be released around the same time which we will be applying during the maintenance window.

We're unsure the contents of the security update at this time, but have been told there is no reason to believe it has been exploited in the wild.

During the maintenance window, the following services will be unavailable:

• pawb.fun
• pawb.social
• furry.engineer

We'll have updates throughout the maintenance window available at https://t.me/pawbsocial.

We hope to complete the maintenance as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience this causes.

EDIT Mitigated (7/3 10:14 AM): We’ve been temporarily downgraded to 100Mbps to lower the bandwidth stress on the network due to a damaged fiber trunk cable.

The service should be stable now but some requests may take longer than expected due to occassional ping spikes.

An engineer has been scheduled for Wednesday 7/5 and we’ll have an update then. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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EDIT (7/3 @ 1:29 AM): The service appears to be mostly functional again and is processing through missed messages, so you may see delays in receiving notifications and feed posts from during the downtime.

We’re still seeing above normal pings and the occasional dropped packets, but the connection seems mostly stable.

We’ll check in again around 10 AM US Mountain Time.

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EDIT (7/3 @ 12:52 AM): We've exhausted our troubleshooting at this time and are waiting a repair technician. While the service does appear to be more stable right now, we're still seeing higher than normal pings.

We've created a backup Telegram channel for announcements in the event of the site going offline again: https://t.me/pawbsocial.

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As of July 2nd, 2023 at 10:07 PM, we're currently experiencing an intermittent Internet outage. We've reported the issue to our ISP and are awaiting a resolution.

The service may be partially or fully unavailable for short periods during this time.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Applications are now closed! Thank you to everyone who applied, we’ll be reviewing the applications this week and be in touch soon!

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EDIT: Due to issues with sending DMs between Lemmy and Mastodon, if you're on Pawb.Social submitting an application, please send it to @admin@pawb.social via https://pawb.social/create_private_message/126149 instead.

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Pawb.Social services have been steadily growing more and more over the past few months, from the debacle of Twitter and the meltdown of Reddit, we've seen users flocking to not only our instances but those of our wider fediverse community.

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Seeking Content Moderators

We're seeking to bring on a small group of volunteer Content Moderators to help with addressing reports, identifying content that breaks the Code of Conduct, and assisting users with concerns and issues.

Please consider the following questions:

• Are you friendly, polite, and willing to be approached by users?
• Are you willing to help users on our instances?
• Do you have free time to commit and are you able to stick with it long term (6+ months)?
• Do you work well with others in a team?
• Are you willing to join a Telegram group to coordinate decisions, issue reporting, and communications with the team?
• Have you ever had any moderation experience?
• Which instance would you prefer to moderate? (furry.engineer, pawb.fun, pawb.social, all?)
• Do you understand that reports you handle may result in being exposed to indecent, graphic, or otherwise rule-breaking imagery that may be disturbing?

You may (but are not required to) add additional information to your application giving us a little background on yourself, why you're interested in joining the team, your favorite topic (Lemmy) / hashtag (Mastodon), or anything else you'd like. Not including this will not affect your application, it's purely optional.

How to apply

If the questions haven't scared you away and you're still willing to assist us, you must have been a user on Pawb.Social services for at least one (1) week, have had no previous CoC violations, and have no history of recent (past few years) disruptive or abusive behavior within online communities.

If you'd like to apply from Mastodon, please send a DM to @staffapps@furry.engineer.

If you're on Lemmy and you'd like to apply, click this link to send a DM from your Pawb.Social account: https://pawb.social/create_private_message/126149.

Timeline

Applications will remain open for two (2) weeks and will close on July 14th, at noon US Mountain Time.

We expect to review the applications the following week and reach out to all applicants with the result of their application shortly thereafter.

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Thank you for being the awesome part of Pawb.Social!

We've just updated to the latest version of Lemmy which comes with a ton of bug fixes and an updated UI without websockets (yay, easier debugging).

You can find the full changes over at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.0.

This also appears to have fixed an issue with connecting to kbin instances. You should now be able to search those up in the same way as other Lemmy communities: !community@domain, but let us know if there's any issues!

Over the past 48 hours, we've received a lot of discourse regarding the upcoming "Project 92" platform created by Facebook and the anti-meta fedi pact.

While we're still in early days of the request for comments, a clear pattern has emerged that users of Pawb.Social services unequivocally do not want their data to be abused by corporate interests, such as those of Facebook.

Over and above the corporate interests, Facebook has also demonstrated a repeated failure to enact meaningful moderation changes to avoid abusive content on their platform, especially misinformation.^[1][2][3]

> "I do wonder if this discussion is a little academic, because I feel like Meta instances are very likely to get defederated for some reason under the current rules, like poor moderation, spam, or generic abuse." ^[4]

As pointed out above, excluding the corporate interests, the discussion is somewhat moot due to the concerns regarding moderation which would lead to a Facebook operated instance being inevitably suspended.

For these reasons, Pawb.Social (including furry.engineer and pawb.fun) will suspend any and all Facebook owned, operated, or affiliated instances in the interests of protecting our users and communities.

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sources and references

[1] Emma Graham-Harrison and Alex Hern; The Guardian. 2020. "Facebook funnelling readers towards Covid misinformation - study." Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-funnelling-readers-towards-covid-misinformation-study

[2] Wes Davis; The Verge. 2023. "Meta is rolling back its covid-19 misinformation rules in the US." Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/17/23764429/meta-covid-misinformation-rules-facebook-instagram

[3] Kris Van Cleave; CBS Evening News. 2021. " CBS Evening News Internal Facebook documents detail how misinformation spreads to users." Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-documents-misinformation-spread/

[4] Cyrik (@CyrikCroc). 2023. Comment on topic "Join or ignore the anti-meta fedi pact". Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://pawb.social/comment/239407

Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the lack of transparency we've had on Pawb.Social, compared to our usual standards with the Mastodon instances.

We should ensure that all of our users are well aware of when we make important decisions that may affect their abilities to view content from other instances.

So for that, I'm sorry.

Secondly, we've now created an additional community over at /c/adminlog which will document all of the administrative-level decisions taken by the Admin team which won't show up in the Modlog.

These decisions will include: Defederation, removal of community images (banners / icons), addition / removal of moderators, and addition / removal of instance admins.

We'll prefix each post with tags to identify what type of action it is at a glance followed by the instance or community name, and detail in the post what action we took and why we took it.

If you have any questions or concerns, you can leave them here or post them in the feedback community as many of you already have done.

Thanks, Crashdoom

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16351

> cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15953 > > > Hi all! > > > > So, I'm assuming everyone has seen links like https://beehaw.org/c/news and clicked through to find it doesn't work right because it's a different site (I'm assuming a different instance here). > > > > Well, I just stumbled across an interesting feature: if you enter a link in the following format, it works for everyone regardless of instance of origin: > > > > [News]\(/c/news@beehaw.org) > > > > News > > > > [My User]\(/u/barbarian@lemmy.reckless.dev) > > > > My User > > > > You're welcome!

Maintenance on both instances has concluded!

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• 11:32 AM MST: All feeds on pawb.fun have been regenerated, and maintenance is now concluded.
• 11:25 AM MST: pawb.fun is back online! Feeds are being re-generated so this may take a little while and you may see a blank timeline until the system re-generates yours.
• 11:12 AM MST: pawb.fun data has been transferred and is being loaded into Postgres.
• 10:57 AM MST: Maintenance on pawb.fun has begun.

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• 11:09 AM MST: All feeds on furry.engineer have been regenerated, and maintenance is now concluded.
• 10:54 AM MST: furry.engineer is back online! Feeds are being re-generated so this may take a little while and you may see a blank timeline until the system re-generates yours.
• 10:37 AM MST: furry.engineer data has been transferred and is being loaded into Postgres once more.
• 10:00 AM MST: Maintenance on furry.engineer has begun.

----

On June 10th, starting at 10 AM MST, we'll be migrating furry.engineer and pawb.fun back to the main server infrastructure.

We expect the transfers to take no longer than an hour each to complete, starting with furry.engineer and following with pawb.fun.

After the maintenance, it may take up to an hour for the feeds to be regenerated so your timeline may appear blank or be missing posts -- Don't panic!

The Lemmy instance, pawb.social, will remain online throughout the transfer and we'll be updating this topic with the status as we progress.

This is a part of the official Pawb.Social Code of Conduct.

5. CW: Content warning policies

PAWB.SOCIAL USERS, PLEASE READ: Content warning policies only apply to the Mastodon instances run by Pawb.Social (furry.engineer and pawb.fun), with the exception of NSFW content and communities which must still be marked as such.

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Content warnings are a way of hiding content behind a short, inoffensive message that allows users to know before they click to view the content. This helps users avoid certain uncomfortable topics they don’t want to see, or would otherwise be inappropriate for them to open in a given environment. For example: Accidentally opening a NSFW image at the grocery store.

! Example of a post with a content warning on Mastodon web v4.0.2.

5.1. Content that requires a CW

Posts originating on Pawb.Social instances must comply with the CW policies listed below. For exceptions that may apply to locked accounts, see Rule 5.4.

As some posts boosted by users originate on other instances, we understand there may be differences in policies regarding the usage of content warnings. For that reason, we won’t take action against our users that boost content without a CW, but may apply moderation actions against the post, such as marking as sensitive or deletion in severe circumstances.

Content warnings required by this section must be added through the CW system built into Mastodon; simply using the text “CW” but leaving the content visible is not acceptable. On the web client, this is by clicking the “CW” button under the post textbox, and will vary on mobile clients but typically use “CW” or a warning triangle.

5.1.1. CW: NSFW content without a CW

Any NSFW content, including real or artistic (digital or otherwise), must be behind a content warning message.

NSFW content includes, but is not limited to: nudity, sex, kink, and the discussion of such.

CW Message Format

Ideally, your CW should start with “NSFW” (case-insensitive) and include a rough summary of the type of content.

5.1.2. CW: Political discussion and debate without a CW

Political discussions and debates, due to the polarizing and sensitive nature of both subjects, must be behind a content warning message.

Discussions of politics can be emotionally destabilizing and distressing to others given recent political events.

However, content promoting and supporting marginalized groups, or activism towards positive social change, such as BLM, trans rights, LGBTQ+ rights, are exempt from this rule. Additionally, the expression of identity and lived experience do not fall under the category of ‘political discussion’ for the purposes of this rule.

Per Rule 2, any content containing political rhetoric against a marginalized group is expressly prohibited and will not be tolerated.

CW Message Format

Ideally, your CW should start with “Pol” or “Politics” (case-insensitive) and include a rough summary of the topic.

For country-specific politics, we recommend adding a country-tag in your CW message. For example, “US pol” or “USPol” (case-insensitive) for US-related politics discussions.

5.1.3. CW: Religious promotion and debate without a CW

Promotion, endorsement, and debates on religion, due to the polarizing and sensitive nature, must be behind a content warning message. Self-expression of religious or spiritual beliefs are exempt from this rule.

However, per Rule 2, harassment and abuse towards any user based on their religious or spiritual preference (inc. Atheism) is expressly prohibited and will not be tolerated.

CW Message Format

Ideally, your CW should start with “Rel” or “Religion” (case-insensitive) and include a rough summary of the topic.

5.1.4. CW: Drugs without a CW

Posts and boosts discussing Schedule I or II substances or topics of substance abuse, must be behind a content warning message.

Discussion about the use of scheduled substances may still constitute a violation of Rule 1 (Illegal content or conduct) if it is found to be encouraging use (or misuse, in cases of substances with safe and accepted medical uses), or attempting to engage in a sale or transfer of prohibited or scheduled substances.

CW Message Format

Ideally, your CW should start with “Drugs” (case-insensitive) and include a rough summary of the topic.

5.1.5. CW: Graphic depictions of injuries with blood and gore

Posts and boosts about and media containing graphic depictions of injuries that include blood and gore must be behind a content warning and must be marked as sensitive media.

CW Message Format

Ideally, your CW should start with or contain “Graphic injury”, “injury, blood”, “injury, gore”, or any combination of such to clearly indicate the severity. We strongly recommend that little, if any, context is added to the CW message to avoid breaking Rule 5.2.

5.2. CW: Sensitive content in CW message

When creating a content warning message, please do not put any polarizing or graphic content into the message.

For example, don’t use “NSFW, <long graphic explanation of how hard and well you can do sexual intercourse>”, instead use something like “nsfw, m/m, con-noncon, bondage, long video” – Basically, explain the content behind the warning, without painting a detailed picture.

5.3. Content that we recommend a CW

For these categories, we would prefer that posts and boosts use a content warning, but are not required.

These are recommendations that provide a better experience to all users on our service and other federated instances by allowing them to opt-out of viewing such content.

While we won’t take action against accounts that don’t mark these types of content, you may end up blocked by other users or limited on other instances which may have stricter rules.

5.3.1. Spoilers

When a new movie, game, or other media comes out, everyone gets excited. However, for example, having the ending of a game spoiled before you’ve even got to enjoy it really sucks. So we strongly recommend that any potential spoilers are behind a CW to give everyone the same enjoyment.

Suggested CW Message Format

Your CW should start with, or contain, “Spoiler” (case-insensitive) and include a rough summary of the media it’s a spoiler about. For example: “Spoiler: OneShot game ending.”

5.3.2. Topics around mental health

Topics around mental health can be fatiguing to users also suffering from mental health issues, so it’s recommended and appreciated for such topics to be behind a CW, but is not required.

Suggested CW Message Format

Your CW should contain “MH”, “MH-”, “MH+” or other similar indication, and optionally an additional summary at your discretion.

5.4. CW Exception: Locked accounts and follower-only posts

If your account is marked as requiring follow requests (Settings → Profile → Appearance), it is acceptable to omit explicit content warnings and marking as sensitive media on your posts under these conditions:

• Your account is marked as “Require follow requests”; and
• All posts omitting a CW required under Rule 5.1 are marked as “Followers only”; and
• You have an appropriate warning in your profile description about the lack of CWs and a general guide on what kind of CW topics you post (e.g. “NSFW”, “porn”, etc.)

!

!Pawb.Social Logo

Pawb.Social Code of Conduct and Policies

The Pawb.Social administration team wants to create and foster a diverse, welcoming community, and a safe space where those within the LGBTQ+ community can be themselves.

This Code of Conduct applies to all services run by Pawb.Social, including furry.engineer, pawb.fun, and pawb.social, any media or files uploaded by users to any of our services, as well as in any private communication conducted on or through any of our services.

Rules

By utilizing any of our services, you agree to abide by this Code of Conduct and breaking it may result in sanctions against your account.

1. Illegal content or conduct

Content or conduct that is illegal in the United States is strictly prohibited. Pawb.Social services are operated and maintained within the United States and all content must comply with the federal laws of the United States.

For the avoidance of doubt, this includes but is not limited to: Instructions on how to commit crimes, encouraging acts of violence or terrorism, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or depictions thereof, and unauthorized access or exploitation of computer systems.

2. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other discrimination is prohibited

We take a hard stance against any form of discrimination or abuse towards users in our community. Users who engage in such conduct are not welcome on our platform.

3. Don’t stalk or harass other users

Respect other users of our service and other federated instances. If someone doesn’t want anything to do with you, leave them alone. Attempts to bypass blocks, including creating alternate accounts for that purpose, is prohibited.

“Screenshot dunking”, or the act of taking screenshots of posts to repost and harass without directly replying, is strongly discouraged. If someone is annoying you, harassing you, or a genuine danger to other users, block and report them.

4. Misinformation and deceptive content is prohibited

Misinformation, scams, Ponzi schemes, and other deceptive tactics have become rampant on other platforms and we don’t want to see a resurgence of it in the Fediverse.

Examples of prohibited content include, but are not limited to, the following: COVID and health misinformation, pro-insurrection (Jan 6th) comments or endorsement, NFTs, “crypto” (blockchain & tokens, NOT cryptography), MLMs / pyramid schemes, flat earth claims.

5. CW: Content warning policies

Please see the Content Warning Policy post.

6. Respect the service

Do not perform any manual or automated penetration testing against our production services without prior written approval which can be obtained by contacting us at network@pawb.social.

Spam and advertising is not acceptable, but friendly automated bots are welcome. Where possible, try to restrict any recurring automated posts to Unlisted to avoid cluttering the Local and Federated timeline.

Use of automated tools on the service is permitted for personal use, where such tools do not impact the performance of the services.

Additionally, the use of automated tools by, or on behalf of, archival organizations (such as WaybackMachine) are permitted when limited in scope. For example, archiving a user’s profile or a specific toot. For larger scopes, please contact us at network@pawb.social for approval and assistance.

7. Use the report system

If a user or instance is breaking the rules, we recommend just reporting the content and not engaging. We don’t want users to end up getting caught in the crossfire for attempting to correct a user in good faith, as this makes our jobs significantly harder.

Additionally, the team is here to help – If you’re unsure on a particular post, user profile, instance, etc. and don’t think we’ve seen or dealt with it yet, please send in a report. No user will ever be penalized for genuine use of the report system.

8. AP: Account policies

8.1. Posting language

While English is the primary language of the instance, we have no restrictions on the languages that can be used. However, we do require that all posts are properly marked with the language used, which can be done at the account level through the account preferences page, or per-post by clicking the language button next to “CW” (Content Warning).

Setting the correct language allows users to utilize the built-in LibreTranslate system to translate posts to their preferred language, and assists the moderation team with addressing concerns raised by other users.

8.2. Misleading or deceptive impersonation

You may not impersonate an individual, group, or organization with the intent to deceive, confuse, and exploit other users.

However, it is not a violation of this rule to impersonate for the purposes of parody, commentary, or fan accounts, so long as such accounts remain respectful and abide by the Code of Conduct. Parody accounts should tag themselves clearly in their profile description.

8.3. Bot accounts

Bot accounts must be marked as a bot using the “This is a bot account” option under Profile → Appearance.

Bots must post using either “Unlisted”, “Followers only”, or “Mentioned people only”, so we can keep the local and federated timelines clear and focused on users.

Bots must be made to heed the API rate-limits and should have a minimal impact on the instance performance.

All bots are expected to refuse to communicate, scrape, or otherwise access profiles with the “#NoBot” (case-insensitive) tag in their profile.

Restrictions on posts and interactions with users do not apply to official, administrative use bots.

8.4. Brand and Government-affiliated accounts

No brand or government-affiliated account may be registered on Pawb.Social services without prior written and publicly recorded approval, except furry fandom-operated brands and events covered by the exception below. This approval may be revoked by Pawb.Social at any time for any reason.

Brand and Government-affiliated accounts and instances must post using either “Unlisted”, “Followers only”, or “Mentioned people only”, so we can keep the local and federated timelines clear and focused on users. Remote users and dedicated instances violating this rule will be limited and their content only available to followers and through boosts.

However, furry fandom-operated brands and events are exempt from this rule as we want to encourage and support business within the fandom. This rule may be revised at a later date dependent on the future volume impact on the public timelines.

8.5. Bypassing suspension

If you have been suspended from any Pawb.Social instance, you may not create another account on any of our services.

8.6. Inappropriate avatar or header image

All avatars and header images must not contain any content that is prohibited by any other rule in the Code of Conduct, especially content that requires a Content Warning.

After quite a while, @crashdoom has finally found something to do with pawb.social -- Introducing, Lemmy!

Lemmy is a selfhosted, federated social link aggregation and discussion forum, similar to Reddit, but using ActivityPub just like Mastodon.

This instance will serve as Pawb.Social's foot-in-the-door and an expansion of our services beyond Mastodon, but we won't be restricting usage to just users from furry.engineer and pawb.fun -- Anyone is free to join!

Any user can create their own community within the instance, share it with other instances, and create a conversation around their favorite topics.

Though, if you have a Mastodon account already, you don't need an account to post here! Just take the community name to the right (e.g. pawbsocial_announcements, remove the !) and mention it in a post:

> @pawbsocial_announcements@pawb.social Hey, I can post to Lemmy from Mastodon!

You can also follow the community group account to get new posts straight on your existing Mastodon feed!

We'll be utilizing two communities for official purposes: Pawb.Social Announcements for news and info about Pawb.Social services and Pawb.Social Feedback to receive feedback, issues, and comments on policy from our users.

We hope you'll enjoy and help us create yet another amazing community together!

-Crash

Pawb.Social Network Owner

----

Mobile Apps

If you'd like to browse on your phone, take a look at the list of apps on the Join Lemmy website! There's both a client for iOS and Android, so no one should be left out!

Popular Communities

• Furry Technologists (!tech@pawb.social or tech@pawb.social on Mastodon)

• Furry Musicians (!musicians@pawb.social or musicians@pawb.social on Mastodon)

• Virtual Reality (!virtualreality@pawb.social or virtualreality@pawb.social on Mastodon)

• Furry (!furry@pawb.social or furry@pawb.social on Mastodon)

• Game Development (!gamedev@pawb.social or gamedev@pawb.social on Mastodon)

• Transformation [NSFW] (!transformation@pawb.social or transformation@pawb.social on Mastodon)

Remote Communities

• Furry (!furry@yiffit.net or furry@yiffit.net on Mastodon)

• Yiff [NSFW] (!yiff@yiffit.net or yiff@yiffit.net on Mastodon)

• gfur / Gay Fur [NSFW] (!gfur@yiffit.net or gfur@yiffit.net on Mastodon)

Formerly Reddit Communities

You can find official and unofficial Reddit communities that moved to the Fediverse with the awesome tool over at https://sub.rehab/!