A server for art, gaming, and musings about the world, with the occasional meme and lighthearted joke. Running for 2.5+ years, dedicated to providing you a place to be social without being the product

What is this?

Toot.Garden is an server that is meant for art, gaming, and musings about the world, with the occasional meme and lighthearted joke. Running for 1.5+ years, this server is dedicated to providing you a place to be social without being the product. Whoever you are, you should feel at home here. This should be your place to grow, connect, and share! That's the goal anyway!

The beauty of Mastodon is it allows for server owners, and their communities to moderate and curate content as they wish. This server is not a place for racism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, or alt-right thinking/discourse. Should activities, posting, or otherwise be infringing upon this, a swift ban will be placed upon the infringing account.

What is Mastodon?

Chances are you are coming from Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit, which is cool! Welcome to the Fediverse. If you have never interacted in this "realm" of the internet, I will direct you to these awesome pages that will help you get acquainted.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/ https://axbom.com/fediverse/

Host Transparency

In an effort to be fully transparent about the server, I've listed some general stats/info on it below.

• Host - Hetzner, Dedicated Server Line
• Raid - Raid 1 - NVMe SSDs
• RAM - 64GB DDR4
• Bandwidth - 1 Gbps up & down, unmetered
• Cloudflare - DNS - No proxy
• Backblaze B2 - Media storage/CDN

Network

• Hetzner - Mastodon frontend + backend, and mail server.
• Site-to-Site VPN Host - Redacted for security, 1gb/s up/down, connects the network together.
• Protectli Firewall Box - Handles secure network access, and real-time security alerting.
• Gen 9 HP Proliant - Raid 6 SSDs, Hyper-V containers, handles backups, alerting, network monitoring, and internal management tools.
• Gen 8 HP Proliant - Raid 6 SSDs, Bare-Metal, handles grafana logging, stats aggregation. Also used as a development server to test Mastodon upgrades.

Instance Language

This instance is primarily English speaking, and the default locale is EN.

Instance Translation Service

As of Nov 1st, 2023, we now support post translation to your default language. If you believe we are missing a lanuage, please contact the instance admin to see if he can find a language pack.

If you are a smaller instance (under 1000 active users), who would like to utilize our translation API, send me an email at alienknight@toot.garden, I'd be more than happy to send you an API key.

Instance Status

Toot.Garden uses Grafana to monitor network status, a public dashboard is coming soon.

Service cost

The current monthly cost to run toot.garden optimally, and securely, comes out to ~70$ USD a month.

Donations/Tips

Currently, and for the foreseeable future, toot.garden is run by AJ Nicoloff, and all server hosting and backup costs are paid for out of pocket- there is no company sponsor. Any donations to the Ko-fi will help keep things going!

Mastodon Covenant

I abide by the covenant set forth by the community, and open-source contributors, as listed at https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

Scraping

Please note that scraping tools that do not make use of the mastodon API, will be blocked. If you use a tool such as Fedifetcher you are fine, but directly scraping web content will result in your IP being ratelimited, or blocked entirely.

Fedifetcher

As of Nov 10th, 2023, every hour the instance runs Fedifetcher with settings that pull in missed replies, boosts, and favorites to posts engaged with by members of toot.garden. This does not scrape data, rather it utilizes the mastodon API to re-check for data on the posts home instance.

Source Code. Thank you to @michael@mstdn.thms.uk for this awesome tool!

Contact the Admin

Should you need to contact me via email, you can reach me at alienknight@toot.garden. For DMCA requests, and other legal requests, please also send them to this email.

1. We do not permit NSFW or NSFL content to be posted on this server whatsoever, this ranges from excessively NSFW messages and imagery to NSFL content such as extreme gore. There are other servers where that can be posted.
2. Never share any personally identifiable information about yourself or others, such as addresses, school, etc. this is for the safety of you and others.
3. The incitement or promotion of violence and or violent ideologies is not permitted here.
4. It should go without saying, but- racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and antisemitism is not permitted, and is not tolerated. We are all people, let's treat each other as such.
5. Listen to others, if you’re accused of causing harm, or making someone uncomfortable, take a step back, recognize that the other person may see things differently, and take responsibility for your actions. If you need an intermediary, please contact the moderation team.
6. Use the report feature before getting into arguments, or causing conflict. Our moderation team is here to assist and take care of these things.
7. Automated account reposting from sites such as Twitter (X), Facebook, Reddit, etc. is not allowed unless you have first contacted alienknight@toot.garden, this is to prevent spam, and potential abuse. Upon approval, your account will have a badge applied to it that will help prevent reports.
8. Civil political discussion is fine, but mark it with a CW for those who may wish to avoid it. Please be mindful of global conflicts, and make educated choices on posts that may make light of situations that are very real for others. Reports about such content may lead to said posts being removed.