@NoFlexZone I guess that's not a bad way to put it, in this case the Mastodon instance did come first before I started working for myself full time. The company itself is a bit of a weird one where it's both all the various side gigs / projects I've tinkered with over the years including Mastodon as well now as me working full time providing IT Consultancy services to other companies.

I don't think I've ever quite thought as what I've built as an "MSP" mostly because I tend to specialise in projects and designing / architecture of new things and that tends to be a lot of the work I do rather than maintaining systems or providing support for IT Systems but I might also just have an out of date view on what an MSP is now as I know they tend to do a lot more than just tier 1 support and keeping the lights on!

That's the access request submitted to visit the collocation DC next Monday to perform some hardware upgrades and network improvements which should allow me to finish migrating everything off of our old cluster as well as massively expand our capacity.

I'm also hoping this should unlock me completing the pilot activities to start being able to rent IPv6 only VPS's from the hardware deployed as I think most of the back-end configuration is now in place to facilitate that which will be really nice to have completed and setup. Hoping by mid-Feb that'll be a service offering that will be live on https://superior-networks.com as part of the process to move our hosting onto our own physical hardware instead of hardware we've historically leased from other providers.

For folks on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - I need to restart the gateway router which runs the sites due to a bug that has been identified. This will mean both sites will be down for a few mins as well as the Universeodon relay so FYI also to #MastoAdmin

For those that would like some more info, I've gone ahead and written up a blog post with a few bits that might be useful for the #MedMastodon community to know including a bit about who has taken over the site and what the future holds (TLDR it's not a lot that is interesting, just keeping the site stable and working nicely!) you can find the blog here - https://blog.atlas-media.co.uk/2026/01/05/med-mastodon-the-future/

Just as a quick note as well for #MedMastodon folks - The instance is going to be staying up longer term, I have no intention to just shut the instance down after the current subscription expires at the end of the month.

The transfer ended up happening a bit quicker than I had expected (A great thing in this case) but it did mean I was mid way through cooking dinner and working on a customer project when everything started to progress so I haven't quite gotten around to writing something more detailed up in terms of the future of the site but do want to confirm the plan is for it to be sticking around long term now no matter what

@ndrwy Just to confirm I've been transfered ownership. The site has been renewed and there's no plan for it to be cancelled now so folks are safe to keep their account as is if they wish though as with all things backing up follower / following relationships is always a sensible thing to do.

I've sent an email out to everyone registered on the site to let them know the site is back online and their accounts are fully operational and will be working behind the scenes to move the hosting to the same setup as my other two instances.

@julian So the plan will be to migrate everything onto the same servers we use for MastodonAppUK and Universeodon (Keeping it as it's own separate instance). as we made a fairly large investment back in September of last year into our own owned hardware with plenty of headroom for Growth.

There are some complexities around making this happen that come with taking on a new instance and taking on one that uses managed hosting right now but my intention is any changes that are made will be behind the scenes to reduce the hosting costs and align with how my existing instances run rather than anything that the community is going to notice or be impacted by.

Okay #MedMastodon folks - The instance is now back up and running I'm pleased to share. Things might take a moment to catch-up and I have sent out an announcement so hopefully anyone that had accounts that doesn't see this will get the e-mail ping letting them know everything is currently back online.

I will post a bit more about the plan in the near future but the long story short is nothing is planned to change that folks will see, the main goal for me is to get the site up and running, catch up on the activities that look to be outstanding and get a plan together for migrating everything onto new infrastructure.

Also a huge shoutout to @mastohost who have been excellent at keeping the server "Paused" effectively without deleting data even when there was no confirmed migration path and a real big thanks to Nick for being willing to transfer the server and keep the community running!

EDIT - Blog post with details: https://blog.atlas-media.co.uk/2026/01/05/med-mastodon-the-future/

@noodlemaz @shlee @PostersUnionAU There has also been a fair bit of discussion on Reddit fwiw and I know there was some discussion on the hashtag a few days ago as well - https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/1pxtglg/my_instance_went_dark_is_there_any_possibility_of/

@noodlemaz @shlee @PostersUnionAU FWIW the original owner of MedMastodon has said they're open to transferring ownership, I have sent them an e-mail as have a few others offering to take on the hosting and running of the site. I'm hopeful one of us that have offered can pick the site up before the data is deleted by the host so folks don't loose post history and follower / following relationships.