If you are self-hosting both a PDS and an Ozone instance, you will want to set up these environment variables on your PDS so that your PDS and Ozone can correctly talk to each other, in particular so Ozone can send email notifications via your PDS SMTP settings, as well as act as its "moderation service".

on your pds.env or your PDS container environment

PDS_MOD_SERVICE_DID="<your Ozone's service account DID>" PDS_MOD_SERVICE_URL=""

note that even if you have PDS_EMAIL_SMTP_URL and

PDS_EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS set, these will not be used

by Ozone unless you also set these two

(you can reuse the same values):

PDS_MODERATION_EMAIL_SMTP_URL="" PDS_MODERATION_EMAIL_ADDRESS=""

Thanks to @baileytownsend.dev for helping troubleshoot and figure this out, and to @thisismissem.social for calling it out as well on this helpful thread!

Just realised many self-hosted PDSes likely don't have moderation emails enabled because email config doesn't cascade to moderation email config, so you have to specify both 🤔

— Emelia (@thisismissem.social) November 13, 2025 at 4:15 AM