This guide assumes you have set up an instance following the Up & Running Guide.

If you plan on using your instance just for yourself (eg. [email protected]) or would prefer not to manage an instance with multiple users, then you can convert to "single user mode". This will default the home page to your profile and disable registrations.

Important: Converting to single user mode will use the first user created on the instance as the default user. It's recommended that you register only 1 user on the instance before converting over.

First, while logged in as the mastodon user, navigate to the install directory:

cd /home/mastodon/mastodon

Next up, let's edit our .env.production file:

nano .env.production

Scroll down until you see a block that looks like this:

# Registrations
# Single user mode will disable registrations and redirect frontpage to the first profile
# SINGLE_USER_MODE=true

Edit the third line above and remove the #, so it looks like this:

# Registrations
# Single user mode will disable registrations and redirect frontpage to the first profile
SINGLE_USER_MODE=true

Once done, press ^X, type Y and hit Enter to save your changes.

Now let's rebuild the updated containers without touching the database:

docker-compose build

..and bring it online:

docker-compose up -d

Wait up to a minute for nginx to start talking with the container again, then refresh and you should now be in single user mode!

Note: If you keep receving a "502 Bad Gateway" error, you can force it along with a restart of nginx:

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service