Along with our recent server move to Mythic Beasts, this places us firmly in the UK and will allow Jaz to wind down the New York-based charity that has operated toot.wales until now.
Budget
Our services include the Mastodon server, a web site, and our domain names. The annual cost of running the services is currently £3,954, which works out to £329.50 each month.
Although we don't pay our moderators, we'd very much like to get to a point where we can provide a little something each month for the effort and energy our moderators put into keeping Tŵt running.
We very occasionally produce postcards and flyers and such, and may incur a small cost here and there for sundry items. We may also choose to host additional services.
With the arrival of the Online Safety Act we may have to pay for some advice and/or some third-party services to ensure our compliance.
We are still crunching the database indexes and are aware of ongoing issues with loading replies and posting new toots. Please bear with us until everything is completed before we can fully assess if there are any underlying issues not related to the migration we need to address.
The backlog is fully processed and service is at normal levels. The only task remaining is an indexing of the database for the advanced search function, which will take a while to complete. Search is functional but may be slow, buggy, or missing posts.
We are slowly coming back to normal service. The Local Feed should be moving along nicely, but we have over 100,000 backlogged messages in the queue, so your Home Feed will be disjointed and delayed while that queue gets processed. You may see messages out of order, or delayed. Highly technical, scientifically-proven guesstimation says 2 hours or so until we are fully caught up (9pm-ish GMT). Thanks for your patience!
We are back online but very slow as the service catches up with both the ongoing database migration and the jobs we've missed, things will be slow for a while so expect delays with new posts etc.
It's true. Tŵt Cymru is Exiting the EU. In celebration of the five year anniversary of Brexit, toot.wales is moving from France to the UK!
Never again will your Youtube preview card be in French. With our freedom from the oppressive EU wonks your toots are no longer required to be free from malformation or abnormal curvature. Finally, we can plough wasted millions into what's most important, the National Toot Service!
In all seriousness, we are growing and we want to be sure our service is meeting the needs of the community. This change also includes the long-overdue relocation of the non-profit management from the States to the UK. So, what are we doing?
At Tŵt Cymru, our mission is to provide a safe, welcoming, and inclusive space for Wales and the Welsh at home and abroad, along with the wider community of Welsh learners and people with ties to Cymru. Central to this mission is fostering a culture of civil discourse, where users can connect and express themselves without fear of harassment, hate, or harm. This is a commitment we take seriously, to ensure the safety and well-being of our community.
Recently, Meta Platforms announced significant changes to its policies and governance, explicitly allowing forms of speech that were previously deemed unacceptable due to their incivility or potential for harm. While we respect each platform’s right to define its own policies, these changes stand in direct opposition to Tŵt Cymru’s values. Specifically, the decision to tolerate previously prohibited speech creates an environment that risks amplifying harm, undermining trust, and marginalising already underserved communities.
Since Threads signalled their desire to federate, we have treated them like any other domain with which we connect. The recent changes in policy, governance, and stated approach by Meta’s leadership (in effect, the threads.net server admin) means this domain now represents a space which explicitly allows harm.
After thorough review, we have decided to defederate from the Meta Fediverse service threads.net on January 19th, 2025. This means users on Tŵt Cymru will no longer see or interact with threads.net content or accounts. If you prefer for your account to be hosted by a service that may remain connected to threads.net we recommend reviewing the larger servers at https://fedidb.org/network and enquiring as to their connectivity with threads.net, and migrating your account before the date above. If you need help migrating, please email help@toot.wales
We have been testing the Mastodon feature “authorized fetch” for some time, and can now confirm we are going to move forward with this setting enabled.
When a server we are connected to is suspended, it continues to have access to all public posts and profiles, as this information is accessed anonymously unless authorized fetch is enabled.
Authorized fetch requires all Fediverse servers to identify themselves for each request, thereby allowing us to recognize and refuse access to suspended servers.
This does not completely protect any individual content that is posted using the “Public” setting, as this content is also freely available from any web browser. However, it removes the opportunity for suspended servers servers to fetch and interact with your content.
We additionally block access using other tools and resources, as part of our wider toolkit to reduce access for inauthentic actors.
This setting may impact some third-party Mastodon clients, please let us know at help@toot.wales if you encounter any issues.