June 2023

This has been a hectic and busy month. There have been all kinds of challenges, but also a lot of good stuff!

Lemmy

As you might have read in my previous blog, we have setup a Lemmy server 6 weeks ago. In those 6 weeks, it has grown to be the largest Lemmy server, with over 100k users.

This of course also brought many challenges. From a spam wave, to being hacked and also a lot of moderation challenges.

But all in all I'm very pleased with how it's running now, and the team we have assembled. We have around 25 people in our Discord, who help with sysadmin / troubleshooting / moderation etc. Even admins from other instances, and app developers.

Mastodon

For Mastodon.world, there hasn't been too much news. There has been a security fix which we installed, and we're waiting for 4.2.0 to be released so we can get back to stable releases. (We're running a nightly build at the moment, because we needed captcha in order to fight off spam waves)

Calckey

Due to all the attention that Lemmy needed, Calckey.world has been a bit 'forgotten' last month. Performance hasn't been good, we've upgraded the server specs twice.

July 19th there will be a re-branding of Calckey to a new name, together with a release of the new version (which will be v1.0 instead of v14.0). We will upgrade calckey.world to the new version, and decide what to do with it once the name of Calckey has changed. The new name isn't available as a .world domain, so either we think of a new cool domain name, or we keep using calckey.world.

Meta / Threads

The whole threads commotion has been my biggest headache during the past months. I've seen so much negativity, hate, threats etcetera about the topic, that I've not communicated about it a lot.

First of all, I'm a bit neutral here. I want what's safe for our users. In order to have that, we first need to know what it is exactly that's coming. I see a lot of people panicking without knowing or understanding what's to be expected.

Secondly, I prefer to have the moderation teams deciding on this. They have to deal with it more than me, I just keep the server running. After lengthy discussions, the team made this statement on Lemmy.

What I would like to add, is that it's OK to post your opinion, it's OK to block threads for your account if you like (although on Lemmy that doesn't work yet), and of course it's also OK to migrate to another server if you disagree with our decisions. But please, keep it polite. Understand that Fediverse servers are indeed run by real people, not the big corporations. Volunteers, doing their best to provide services for you in their spare time. I've seen admins/mods get threatened over this...

Finances

And now for the fun stuff. The finances.

Running Lemmy brings extra costs, but more so it brings extra donations. And, like with Mastodon in November, this new user influx brought a spike in donations, which will probably also fade over time. But this spike gives us a nice buffer, so we can guarantee the continuity of the servers for at least the next year.

Expenses

The expenses for June were:

(*Other was Netdata, which we use for monitoring all servers (EUR 165,43) and Patreon donations to Mastodon and Lemmy (EUR 99,22))

Total costs: EUR 1217,76

Income

As said, donations spiked this month, and seem to get even higher in July.

Total income: EUR 2547,63