famous mastodon instance author of mastodon.technology Ash Furrow announced, becauseFamily issues combined with technical issues have made it impossible for him to maintain the instance and the mastodon.technology servers will be down by December 1st, 2022.

Mastodon is an open source social network server, based on which anyone can create products similar to Twitter/Weibo (which can be understood as building “private service Weibo/Twitter”), and its positioning is a decentralized social platform– As an alternative to commercial platforms, avoiding the risk of a single company monopolizing communication.

Sites built on Mastodon are called “instances”, and these “instances” are both independent and related to each other (users of different sites can communicate without hindrance).and The mastodon.technology instance is one of them, which is already runningFive and a half years,To date, 23.9K users have been registered and millions of posts have been published.

Unfortunately, one of Ash’s family members was recently diagnosed with a terminal illness. While Ash was rushing to take care of his family, the news of Musk’s restart of the acquisition of Twitter brought a large wave of traffic and an influx of new users to the mastodon.technology server, which directly crashed the server. When Ash woke up, he saw the server downtime alert. He was at a loss for his family’s illness, and had to make time to ssh into the server to make adjustments.

Ash was exhausted by the double whammy of reality and the web, and like many open source authors, Ash was starting to get tired of it all. He elaborated on his current situation in the post:

It all made me realize how little joy I get as an admin of an instance.I startresentmentWork I volunteered to do in the past: I spent countless hours running the instance, troubleshooting technical and auditing issues, and always putting the instance above my own needs, but I can’t put the instance above my family’s needs .

The server has also become too large and complex for me to manage. I’ve always been keen to learn the new skills an instance administrator needs, but I’m running out of steam. Existing monitoring isn’t enough to fix current server issues, and I don’t have more bandwidth to invest in learning skills to diagnose and fix network issues.

In a sense, this is both a personal and a technical issue. I wish I could keep maintaining it, but there’s nothing I can do.

To this end, Ash had to personally shut down the mastodon.technology instance he had maintained for more than five years. By November 1, 2022, the instance will enter read-only mode; until December 1, 2022, users can download Own data (posts/likes etc) and migrate to other new server. On December 1, 2022 the server will be completely shut down and will not be accessible.