Normal usage of the Mastodon web interface often results in rate limiting and posts/timelines/lists becoming temporarily unavailable

[flancian]

Steps to reproduce the problem

1. Try to use a vanilla Mastodon instance following browsing patterns common in 2025, which means potentially having a few different tabs open in different posts/lists/timelines.

Expected behaviour

Mastodon keeps working

Actual behaviour

You soon get rate limited and cease to be able to load your timeline, your profile, etc. for a non-trivial duration

Detailed description

This is as per several previous reports which were classified as suggestions, e.g.:

• Allow administrators to configure rate limits for GET requests #15832
• Configurable rate limits for authenticated users (server setting) #22217

I am opening this as a bug because I've hit this personally, and have gotten reports from users hitting rate limits as an admin of a medium sized instance, often enough to become convinced the current defaults are unreasonable/surprising/suboptimal. Happy to discuss/fold into the right duplicate!

Thank you in advance!

Mastodon instance

social.coop

Mastodon version

v4.3.8 but this has been the case for years (see reports)

Technical details

We're running your docker images.

[renchap]

Could you please first check that the server sees the correct IP?

In Preferences > Account, are the IPs listed under "Sessions" the correct ones?

Also, does this happen after specific actions? And do you have access to your server web logs?

[marijnh]

I am seeing this happen a lot (pretty much reliably, when using the web interface for a couple of minutes) on Firefox Android. I have not had it happen on the web client in Firefox Linux at all, I think, though I use that all the time as well.

Once the error starts popping up ("Rate Limited. Please retry after [time]") more instances of it continue to pile up at a quick rate (I think more than one per second?). The messages soon fill up the entire screen, making it impossible to even keep reading the already loaded content.

So the issues that I'm seeing are

1. The client may be behaving differently on Firefox Android than on other platforms.
2. It appears to not really back off when requests fail, but continues to make them at a rather quick rate.
3. It displays error messages in such a way that they block further use of the interface. Not displaying multiple instances of the same message would already help a lot.

I'm using mastodon.social when seeing this issue. It has been present for at least half a year.

[mlinksva]

I'd been seeing this for years. It seems to have disappeared for me (on mastodon.social). If it isn't luck or my behavior (nothing I'm aware of), I'm idly curious what fixed it, but mostly...thank you!

[dkfellows]

At the very least, the client really shouldn't be filling up the screen with vast numbers of notifications about rate limiting. That's a horribly hostile UX.