December overview
What happened
So after the first blog post, we saw another spike in registrations mid-december. After that, growth has slowed and stabilised. Only a handful of new users every hour. The server is running smoothly.
Moderation
There have been some challenges with moderation. Many reports come in, which are handled promptly and thoroughly by the moderation team (currently 7 people). Some decisions are difficult. They are all made with the rules in mind. There's always the option to appeal a decision (please engage in polite discussion, instead of name-calling and aggressive reactions). Appeals will be handled by a different moderator than the one that made the decision. All in all I think we're doing a good job in keeping a friendly and welcoming community with almost 150.000 users. I am really thankful to the moderation team!
Finances
Donations
We saw many donations come in in December. Thank you all for that!!
- OpenCollective : 1985,53 EUR was raised in December
- Patreon: $673,85 was raised in December
Expenses
Expenses were lower in December, and will be even lower this month, because we have scaled down the e-mail subscription with Mailgun.
- Mail hosting (Mailgun): 201,36 EUR
- Hetzner server costs (server, backup, test server, monitoring etc): 332,29 EUR
- Wasabi media storage: 27,06 EUR
Total costs for December were 560,71 EUR.
Plans
Plans for mastodon.world include:
- Disaster recovery: Next to backups, I would like to setup replication to another data center, just in case..
- Scalability: We're looking into using Kubernetes to scale in case of load-peaks and future growth
- Location: When migrating to Kubernetes, we plan to move the server(s) to The Netherlands, this has to do with jurisdiction. We need to sort out legal stuff, but having the server running in another country than the owner, isn't making it easier..
- Media cache: Media is now served straight from the block storage. This needs some cache in between, and an URL masking that.
Other instances
Next to mastodon.world, I have setup some instances for my own interests:
- A Mastodon instance for music-related accounts: musicworld.social
- A Mastodon instance for pool-players: pool.social
- An Akkoma instance for trying Akkoma: akkoma.nl
- An Akkoma instance for personal use: ruud.social
(I already have a Pixelfed, Peertube and Misskey instance, and of course this WriteFreely blog).
Contact
If you have any questions or remarks, you can contact the admin team via @mwadmin@mastodon.world, and the admins and moderation team can be reached by e-mail: info@mastodon.world