Welcome to woof.tech!Running on woof'ing technologyShort introductionThis instance has been made to increase the options between queer and furry servers! We're aiming to be a nice and friendly instance 🐕!
Everyone who feels like they fit our environment is welcome, although this is an instance for queer, furry or tech people, anyone is welcome as long as they're respectful.
For questions please let me know over at @Purple, or use the email address located on this about page.
StaffThis instance is currently managed by the following team members:
Admin: 🐶
@Purple Co-Admin: 🐺
@unlobitoConfigurationCharacter limit: 1500 Characters
Advanced Search: Supported (+ Extended search patch)
Post translation: Supported
Management and RulesOur server rules are made to provide a guideline on how to behave on our instance, please check them when unsure about something. The rules may change from time to time, if noteworthy changes are in effect this will be communicated through announcements.
As this server is predominantly queer, we have a zero-tolerance policy for hate (especially homophobia and transphobia). If you feel like this may clash with your personal beliefs we'd prefer you finding a different instance.
Questions about our rules are always appreciated, don't hesitate to contact an Admin if anything is unclear.
Instance maintainabilityI (@Purple) consider it important for an instance to be flexible and maintainable. Users of our instance rely on it being available and staying available in the foreseeable future and any doubt of this may hurt trust in this instance.
Because of this when setting up this instance I've made sure it's scalable, with minimal effort we can easily scale up to support thousands of users without major upgrades to how the infrastructure is set up.
Our current setup looks like this:Server hosting:We're currently hosting our instance on Hetzner's Cloud service. This allows us to easily scale up the amount of CPU cores or memory with downtime of less than a few minutes.
Our servers are located in Finland, Europe and currently exist out of 3 VMs for future-proofing and scalability. They have a combined 8 CPU Cores and 14GB of ram.
We can reasonably scale the main server up to 16 cores + 64GB ram before we should look into other options, it's unlikely we'd need to make major changes to our architecture until we hit a few thousand active users or more.
I'm a Linux System Administrator by trade with experience with scaling and optimisation, so this instance strongly benefits from my personal experience in this field :)
Storage hosting:For our storage of our cache content, we use our own S3 solution hosted in The Netherlands. For user content, content we use Scaleway's S3. Using Scaleway allows us to pay only for the storage we use, with the added benefit of not having to worry about running out of space.
Using S3 means we can more easily move our server around if this happens to be needed, making a migration quick and painless. It also offloads the responsibility of serving image and video content away from our main server.
Our storage location for image and video content is The Netherlands both for user and cache content, our storage location for backups is France as Scaleway offers additional data redundancy there.
CDN hosting:Making sure our instance stays fast and responsive, we make use of Bunny.net's CDN service to serve our static image and video content. Especially users outside of Europe will benefit from this as it will provide significantly lower latency for popular cached content.
Data retentionBecause of how federation works, your posts (even through deleted) may hang around on other servers. Although mastodon will inform those instances the post has been removed, we can't guarantee other instances successfully receive or honour this request. This rarely seems to be an issue, but it is something to keep in mind when posting anything to the internet.
When you remove a post the following happens on our side:
Text contentThe post itself is removed from our database right away and is inaccessible for anyone including administrators. The only place it may stay around is our backups, which are permanently removed after 60 days. These backups are never accessed unless in a recovery scenario.
Timeline: - Inaccessible (Through timeline): Right away
- Inaccessible (Through direct URL): Right away
- Permanently unrecoverable: 60 days
Image/Video contentAlthough the content is removed from our storage provider right away, it may stay available through our CDN for a prolonged amount of time for users who have the exact URL to the images. We're working on a solution to immediately remove the content from our CDN, but this currently is not possible.
The CDN will lose the content after it has not been accessed for a bit. However because the CDN caching servers will only remove content if it deems caching other files more important (more frequently accessed etc.), it is hard to tell the exact timeframe.
We will purge the cache a few times a year to allow all files to be refreshed, regardless of file popularity. However unless someone has been constantly refreshing the URL every couple of hours to keep it considered "HOT" on the CDN the file will be gone in a day.
Timeline: - Inaccessible (Through timeline): Right away
- Inaccessible (Through direct URL): Usually: 4-48 hours, but up to 120 days - Permanently unrecoverable: Usually: 4-48 hours, but up to 120 days
RelaysWe're currently connected to the following relays to improve and expand our federation with the rest of the network:
- relay.asonix.dog
- relay.gay
- relay.tiggi.es
DonationsAlthough we appreciate the generosity, we're currently not accepting donations. The operating costs are low enough to not warrant them for now. If this situation ever changes, an option for donating might become available in the future.
For any questions regarding this subject please contact @Purple