A pixel art scene from the game Plinks, showing three small mushroom-like creatures named Epar-Tata, Evea-Unya, and Evea-Ipa standing on a grassy island surrounded by ocean. The island is dotted with glowing yellow and purple flowers. Each Plink has unique colors, purple, green, and brown. On the bottom right, the game’s title “PLINKS” is written in large striped letters. – Plinks by @LevendLichtje

Mastodon Updates#

We got a new major version of Mastodon/glitch-soc this month with Mastodon v4.4 (Official Announcement)

This version brought web interface updates to profiles, list management, media controls, and the navigation menu.

Mastodon now has the ability to display — but not create — quote posts, as part of a staged roll-out of the feature, and the ability to actually quote post will arrive in a future release.

There were also a couple of hotfixes released: v4.4.1, and v4.4.2, with mostly small behind the scenes fixes.

Fetch Replies#

One interesting feature that arrived in v4.4 is the ability for administrators to enable automatically fetching replies to remote posts.

As you might be aware, replies to any given post are not shared across the entire fediverse automatically. If you open a post, you’re probably only going to see replies from anyone that has a follower on the local server, meaning you likely won’t see replies from anyone else. If somebody asks a question, you may not see see many of the answers in the thread. On popular posts especially this can lead to a lot of people replying with the same advice/joke/question etc., because they can’t easily see that multiple other people already have.

The main way to deal with this situation in the past has been to open the original post on the remote server.

Fetch Replies (FETCH_REPLIES_ENABLED=true) has been enabled on PMG, so expanding threads should now generally show a more complete picture of replies than was previously the case, though there are still limitations such as new replies only being fetched every few minutes.

A feature that came in v4.4 (but was broken in glitch-soc until v4.4.2) is the ability to share the referrer when following links from the Mastodon website.

If a user clicks a link on peoplemaking.games the remote site can now see that peoplemaking.games was the referring site, helping Mastodon servers become a more visible source of traffic to webmasters.

Verification Scam#

This month’s flavour of spam was the Verification Scam.

If you receive a message along the lines of “Your account has been temporarily suspended for identity verification.” claiming to come from “Mastodon”, “Mastodon Support”, etc… then it’s a scam, don’t follow any links provided, and please report the post so that the account can be suspended by moderators.

Costs and Donations#

Now that the one-time setup fee is out of the way, our running costs are comfortably covered by existing donations. 🙌

The Wasabi costs have also fallen as expected, and will continue to come down until all of the 90-day minimum charges have ended.

Cost spreadsheet, text follows.

Expand Costs Table
peoplemaking.games July 2025 0.7223
CAD USD
Main Server 12-32GB-512GB -$50 -$36
Media (OVH) 188 GB -$6 -$4
Media (Wasabi) 45 GB + 90 days -$19 -$14
Backups 71 GB -$0.94 -$0.68
Domain Name $37/yr -$3 -$2
Email Server -$5 -$4
Patreon Donations $190 $137
Patreon Fees -$33 -$24
Monthly Totals
Previous Balance -$8 -$6
Total Expenses -$85 -$61
Net Donations $157 $113
Balance $64 $47

Thank you to everyone that has donated through Patreon. There’s no obligation that you donate in order to use the server, but it is most appreciated!

– Brook

If you would like to submit a game launch, work in progress, screenshot, artwork, etc. to be featured in a future post, just send a link or image to @brook