social.lol Mastodon maintenance

We’re migrating our Mastodon object storage (for media) yet again! Here’s what’s up:

• We did this a few weeks ago, but it turns out that Hetzner—while offering awesome hosting hardware—just isn’t cutting it when it comes to their S3-compatible object storage offering. It’s been disappointing.
• Rather than continue to experience the frustration of random media-related outages and other inconsistent behavior, we’re just going to move to another provider that specializes in object storage (Backblaze B2).
• This migration will take place in phases starting March 24 at 23:00 UTC and will take several hours to complete.
• During the migration, you may notice media on remote posts (i.e. posts not authored on social.lol) failing to load. If you’re using the social.lol website, you can use the “Open original page” option to view the post with its media on the original instance. Most Mastodon clients offer a similar feature, too, so you’ll still be able to view images that aren’t loading.
• Remote media for recent posts will be re-fetched in the second phase. That’ll take a few hours to fully restore.
• In the third phase, we’ll fetch and restore any final missing items, like remote avatars and any other miscellaneous media.

Thanks for your patience while we complete this migration (for hopefully the last time!).