At the end of May 2025, I published the metalhead.club song via a Faircamp website at music.metalhead.club. However, not all users were able to follow my links to the Faircamp site without problems. In a few cases, users reported at least one of the following errors to me:
- When users accessed the album page: Error 404 - not found
- When users accessed the main page: The watch.metalhead.club globe was displayed
After a few attempts, I was able to reproduce the error sporadically myself. In the access logs of the Nginx proxy, I noticed that all erroneous requests were made with HTTP/3.
Since the big Twitter wave that flooded the Mastodon network and, more broadly, the Fediverse in the fall and winter of 2022, international users have been playing a bigger role for metalhead.club. The service is hosted entirely in Germany, and that was still the case until recently. However, with the increasing number of international members come new challenges: for example, the rapid delivery of content.
As long as users are mainly located in Germany and Europe, latency times to the “Full Metal Server” in Frankfurt are low. However, the situation is different for users from Canada, the US, and Australia, for example, of whom there are a significant number on metalhead.club. For these users, using metalhead.club was sometimes a bit of a test of patience, as videos and larger images in particular appeared on the website with a slight delay. I can only simulate the situation in the browser, but even a ping of more than 200 ms spoils the fun of scrolling through the timeline in some places.
Two things are usually in short supply when you run a Mastodon instance: Funding and public attention. But both are important so that the instance can continue to operate and - if desired - achieve growth or reach.
My goal with metalhead.club is to offer a professionally hosted platform for everyone who feels at home in the metal music genre. In order for such a theme-based instance to be viable and its users to benefit from it to the greatest extent, it must achieve a certain level of popularity. Nevertheless, the usual advertising media are only of limited use - either because they do not implement my idea of data protection or because they are currently not readily financially viable. Precious donations have to be used sparingly.
My Mastodon instance metalhead.club exists since summer 2016 and seen several waves of new users - but never as many new users as in early November 2022. This has not only led to heavy CPU work on the servers (see my post about scaling up Mastodon’s Sidekiq Workers), but also to greater load on storage space. Mastodon uses a media cache that not only stores copies of preview images for posts containing links - but also copies of all media files that the server knows of. Before the user wave of late 2020 metalhead.club’s media cache was about 350 GB in size with a cache retention time of 60 days. Quickly the numbers escalated and after a few days we were already at 400 GB - and after about 3 weeks we had more than 550 GB of cached media files. Not with 60 days retention time - but with 30 only.
Despite I added hundreds of GB of new storage space, the cache showed no signs of shrinking in the near future, so decided to offload the storage to an S3 storage provider. The local disks would have been full a few days later.