Surprise Social Media Detox
My last toot before a surprise social media detox was at 22:17 on the 19th April 2026.
2026-09-06 EDIT: This section did have an embedded toot from my Mastodon instance. However, I've now taken my instance offline so the toot is not available.
Trying to upgrade my masto instance from 4.3.22 is turning out to be a right bastard of circular dependencies. #selfhosting
I was trying to update from Mastdon 4.3.22 to 4.5.9 via 4.4.0. I should have checked the requirements more carefully, but as this is "only" social media I figured I could be a bit risky. I was running Debian 11, however, there was an issue with the version of Redis that was bundled. "No problems", I thought, "I'll just update Debian". First updated to Debian 12, then I realised that I had to update to Debian 13.
After doing this, there appeared to be some issue with Node v22.22.1 and updating some of the packages in Mastodon. After going round the houses, I was running into a persistent error with doing the yarn install --immutable step of the update. I was getting some persistent errors with the Ruby Gem "Charlock Holmes". I don't know anything about Ruby, or how Mastodon is written, so was really stumbling around in the dark. All I could really ascertain was that Charlock Holmes was having some sort of dependency issue.
In the end to resolve this, I did rm -rf vendor/bundle, whiche meant that I could install Ruby and all the gems again. After this, I then went through the process of updating Mastodon. During the update, I got an error about "collation version mismatch" in the Mastodon database. I assume that I did not successfully complete the database migrations during the 4.4.0 update. To resolve the "collation version mismatch", I ran:
sudo runuser -u postgres -- psql -c 'ALTER DATABASE mastodon_production REFRESH COLLATION VERSION; ALTER DATABASE template1 REFRESH COLLATION VERSION;'
I don't really know what the error is, but it looked OK. The source was from Kali.org .
My conclusion is... check the release notes more carefully than I did! My "detox" lasted about three days, and was fine, really. At least Mastodon is decentralised, so I didn't bring down the whole network.