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Written by Martin Dougiamas on 2025-01-08 at 07:50

@Gargron

I love #Mastodon but I'd really like to see more effort go into making it really easy to maintain a server.

A Mastodon upgrade would ideally be as easy as upgrading any other consumer software.

I think that's the major thing holding it back, tbh.

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Written by Max on 2025-01-08 at 15:48

@martin @Gargron you just said it yourself “any other consumer software”

Hosting a mastodon server is not something a regular consumer would do

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Written by Kevin Hughes 🐝 on 2025-01-08 at 19:46

@maxbob @martin @Gargron I've never thought about this. It always seems really easy but then it occurred to me that I'm a Rails dev in my day job so I do this stuff all day long! There are other web apps I host which update themselves with one button press. I guess that would be pretty cool.

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Written by Martin Dougiamas on 2025-01-10 at 04:27

@kev @maxbob @Gargron

I'm not saying your grandma needs to be able to do it, exactly, but I'm sure you'd agree more servers is better when it comes to the fediverse.

I have a CS background and I've been sysadminning for 30 years, but that doesn't mean I understand (or have any interest in learning) Rails and how it works.

With sysadmin, you sometimes only touch a particular system a couple of times a year, so even when you learn things during one upgrade you forget them again.

In my own project (Moodle) I tried to make every upgrade as automatic as possible. It takes care of all the database updates from any version X to any later version Y, for example without making you work your way through every single version upgrade in-between. Another thing is to make it very tolerant of older versions of dependencies so that the software still works, but it just misses a feature. These are not hard things to do.

On a positive note, what I did last time is feed all of the Mastodon upgrade docs into an AI and got it to sort it out for me, which was very helpful.

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Written by Kevin Hughes 🐝 on 2025-01-10 at 16:41

@martin @maxbob @Gargron oh absolutely. Actually, I think Moodle does this amazingly well. My first job was as a Moodle dev. (I think we drank mojitos at the Open University in 2005!) I love how I could extend it in amazing ways as a developer to make it solve all our problems but also a teacher with a bit of IT skill could crack it open and make some tweaks which made a huge difference to them.

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