April and May 2023 – Financial update
It's been a while, but here's the update about what's been happening to Mastodon.world
What happened
The most important thing that happened was the wave of spam accounts. This wave started at the largest Mastodon server, mastodon.social. But as soon as they installed a Captcha to prevent spam signups, the spammers chose other servers, among which ours.
We got hit by a wave of many spam accounts, sending DMs to users with crypto-spam. We then installed the latest build of Mastodon, which had the emergency-captcha-fix in it, and enabled captcha. This will prevent most of the automated spam signups. It has been quiet since.
Financial update
An update on the finances:
April
Expenses
- Mail: EUR 31,80
- Hetzner (server etc): EUR 382,70
- Storage: EUR 66,13
Total: EUR 480,63
Income
- Patreon $557,39 = EUR 517,87
- OpenCollective: EUR 444,- Total: EUR 961,87
May
Expenses
- Mail: EUR 32,52
- Hetzner (server etc): EUR 424,34
- Storage: EUR 75,69
Total: EUR 532,55
Income
- Patreon $535,19 = EUR 492,37
- OpenCollective: EUR 351,- Total: EUR 843,37
In May, you see that costs have gone up a bit. That's because we've also started a calckey.world server and we needed some extra space for the backup server for mastodon.world.
You'll also notice that donations are going down every month. That's to be expected, number of active users has also gone down, until end of may, when it stabilized. We expext donations to stabilize as well, and if they won't we'll post a message asking for people to donate if they can/want. (We don't do that very often). But also we now have around EUR 8000 reserve, so even if donations might fall below expenses, we're good for quite some time.
But in June, we've started Lemmy.world, which drove costs up, but also generated a lot of new donations. I'll write about that in a next blog post.