server went down again last night but I think I found the issue. turns out if you add any custom selinux policy to fedora coreos right now it fails to apply any policy updates in the future 🙃
gotta admit I'm kinda amused how the issue manifested though - I'd go to login to mastodon, see it was down then ssh into the server and then everything magically starts up
never had an issue before that could be fixed just by logging in