Hiding media attachments on fediverse servers

fediverse-hide-media.md

Mastodon

Solution 1: make media upload directories write-only

chmod 722 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/cache
chmod 722 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/media_attachments

# reset permissions
chmod 777 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/cache
chmod 777 /home/mastodon/live/public/system/media_attachments

Solution 2: nginx conf (work in progress)

nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
nano /home/mastodon/live/dist/nginx.conf

http {
  server {
    location ~ ^/system/media_attachments/ {
      return 503;
    }

    location ~ ^/system/cache/media_attachments/ {
      return 503;
    }
  }
}

# restart nginx
sudo systemctl reload nginx

# restart mastodon, for good measure?
systemctl reload mastodon-web && systemctl restart mastodon-sidekiq

Just thinking out loud, untested:

  location ~* \.(png|jpg|jpeg|gif|webp|avif|ico|svg)$ {
    return 503;
  }

@krzysztofjeziorny Thank you for sharing this! I'm not sure it's necessary to block all the images, icons, etc, that Mastodon uses outside of the user-uploaded ones.