July 2023

It's already September and I haven't yet blogged about July... That's partly because of holidays and some personal stuff. But mostly also because of the amount of work Lemmy has brought...

Lemmy.world

In July, user count has grown from 58.000 to 118.000, so that doubled! Mind, this server was only started June 1st... This sort of growth has brought a lot of challenges, but the technical challenges are the fun ones. What has been less fun is the continuous attacks we faced, probably because we're the largest Lemmy server and we've pissed off some folks by moderation actions (defederating from some instances, banning users etc). Luckily we've built a very good and capable team, for both the sysadmin side as well as the moderation side.

There also has been good cooperation with admins of other servers, especially those of lemm.ee and sh.itjust.works. And a lot of app and frontend developers are involved.

We've put the site behind Cloudflare. This is an emergency measure we needed to take, and although CF isn't the popular option, we decided to use it because we knew other Lemmy servers used it successfully. We had no time to look for and test other options. We will do that when stuff settles down.

We also started using Digital Ocean to develop terraform scripts for re-deploying the server for scaling purposes.

Mastodon.world

Actually, for Mastodon.world things have been quiet in July. Which is good.

Calckey.world

The Calckey software has been re-branded to Firefish. We've upgraded calckey.world to the latest, so now it's running Firefish. Unfortunately, the firefish.world domain is already taken, so we're thinking about a new name where we'll create a new Firefish instance. We'll keep calckey.world running for those who don't want to migrate.

Finances

Like June, July also saw many one-time donations because of the Lemmy user influx, and a steady growth in recurring donations. The one-time donations are good for building a reserve, the recurring ones are for the continuity of the platforms. (In August you'll see the one-time donations going down significantly, but the recurring still more than cover our costs).

Because of the attacks on our Lemmy, we have enabled Cloudflare as an emergency measure. We've paid for 1 year, and hope to have found an alternative before that's over.

Expenses

Total costs: EUR 1254,97

The Cloudflare is a one-time (yearly) cost.\ Mailgun will be much cheaper from now on, because the largest user influx of Lemmy seems over.

Income

These were the donations received:

Total income: EUR 3727,33

What's next

August has also finished already, we'll make the blog post as soon as all the invoices are in. Costs were less, donations were less. You'll see.

What's also planned, is the creation of a non-profit Foundation which will own all Fediverse platforms run by us (and maybe by others). Main purpose of it will be to not have 1 person be liable in case any bad stuff happening on those instances leads to lawsuits. Also good for continuity to have all things fedi separated.