Waffle's yttrx blog

A little technology blog following my adventures of setting up internet services.

Notes from getting yttrx , a Mastodon community server, up and running: email, defederation tooling, database tuning, and whatever else broke along the way.

Old habits die hard — you can still finger waffles@yttrx.com if you’d rather.

Recent

PR: gate the public hashtag page behind login (scrapers were hammering it)

A patch against Mastodon v4.6.3 that puts yttrx's public /tags page behind a login wall after log analysis showed it was the target of sustained scraping, while leaving the tag API, tag RSS, and federation untouched.

7 July 2026

run your own welcome-bot: a step-by-step guide for other instances

How yttrx's welcome-bot and abuse-bot work, why I built them, and a step-by-step guide to running your own copy.

6 July 2026

Moving the email onto a single platform

Migrating the yttrx mail platform to a single source of truth

4 July 2026

catching up on the anti-abuse stack: welcomebot, abuse-bot, and the new signup scrutiny

What's changed lately in yttrx's anti-abuse tooling: welcome-bot, the report-driven abuse-bot, and two new signals at the signup gate.

3 July 2026

bringing breath back to this journal

I first started capturing some of my technical notes in this journal when starting yttrx.com back in 2022, but eventually fell off maintaining it. Recently, I’ve been doing a bunch of spam/abuse mitigation work on the yttrx signup and abuse reporting workflows, and it hit me that I should probably knock the dust off of this journal. So I migrated it away from jekyll and onto hugo, using a theme that’s consistent with the welcome.yttrx.com site that i recently stood up, and here i’ll keep some of my technical notes on running a mastodon server and dealing with the headaches that it involves.

3 July 2026