So, you have a working Mastodon instance... now what?
The following rake task:
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails mastodon:make_admin USERNAME=alice
or, if using docker:
docker-compose run --rm web rails mastodon:make_admin USERNAME=alice
Would turn the local user "alice" into an admin.
A user that is designated as admin = TRUE
in the database is able to access a suite of administration tools, accessible from the sidebar under "Administration" from the preferences/edit profile page.
Your site settings are stored in the settings
database table, and editable through the admin interface under "Administration" -> "Site settings".
You are able to set settings such as, among others:
You may wish to use the extended description (shown at https://yourmastodon.instance/about/more ) to display content guidelines or a user agreement (see https://mastodon.social/about/more for an example).
Under "Administration" -> "Accounts" you can find your users' accounts. You can:
The following rake task:
RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rails mastodon:add_user
This will guide you through creating a new user interactively. The user will get a confirmation e-mail.
You will e-mail notifications for new reports. Your users can report toots and accounts. You will find those reports under "Administration" -> "Reports". Your options for dealing with reports are as follows:
When a whole instance is engaging in mass-scale hostile activity (spam, vandalism or harrassment), you can save yourself the effort of dealing with individual users by domain-blocking instead. You can create the following domain blocks:
Additionally you can toggle the "reject media" option. When enabled, media files from the domain will not be downloaded to your servers. That includes users' avatars and headers as well as media attachments for toots.
Munin graphs can be generated to track your instance activity.
Feel free to join for all your questions and to get some feedback from other admins!
If you want your instance to appear on the instance picker on joinmastodon.org or the instance directory/wizard on instances.social, you can submit it to instances.social here