Q4 2023 overview
It's been a while since the last blog post. Which is actually a good sign, things have been going well. But let's look back at the last quarter of 2023.
Fedihosting Foundation
First of all: we've started a non-profit Foundation, which will own our Fediverse instances. For now, it's started together with Paul (from the Mastodon.world team) and @stux@mstdn.social who also runs several large Fediverse instances. In the future, other (Dutch) fediverse admins can join.
The primary goals for this non-profit are:
- Improve continuity of these instances
- Share knowledge and resources
- Move liability from the admins to the foundation
We're still in the process of setting things up, but the Foundation is now registered! A website will be created (at https://fedihosting.foundation).
Mastodon.world
Except for some minor issues, like a disk getting full, the Mastodon server has been running fine.
Spam
We did however have a spam issue. Despite the fact that we have a captcha enabled, which does prevent automated spam signups, we kept on seeing a lot of manual spam signups. Mostly Vietnamese casino spam. But these didn't really post a lot so we just removed them in batches when we had some time. But, last month, we started seeing troubling spam accounts, which posted links to child pornography. That's obviously something we'll never tolerate, and we tried several things to prevent these spam accounts from signing up. Unfortunately they kept coming back, so we decided to temporarily limit the signups to 'approval required', meaning anyone signing up should specify a reason for signup and we need to approve (or reject) these. Maybe we'll open registrations up again soon, but on the other hand we catch (almost) all other spam accounts too, which is nice.
Lemmy.world
Our Lemmy instance is running fine. There's a lot of work been done behind the scenes, but the number of incidents has gone down a lot.
We have migrated the image storage from local storage to block storage at Wasabi.
Calckey.world (Firefish) and other instances
The other instances have been running fine, Calckey.world grew to almost 600 users.
Only https://fotofed.nl, our Pixelfed instance, has had some issues. We'll be looking into installing a '.world' Pixelfed instance soon.
Finances
This blog post covers 3 months, so we'll not go into too many details. Let's have some numbers first, and then explain what's happened:
| Month | Expenses | Income (donations) |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 2023 | € 1276,77 | € 1986,37 |
| Nov 2023 | € 1554,84 | € 2026,28 |
| Dec 2023 | € 1465,02 | € 2051,65 |
Remarks:
- In september, next to the expenses mentioned in the previous blog, we also had €907,56 expenses for getting the non-profit setup.
- Normal expenses are the infrastructure costs for Hetzner (servers, storage etc), Wasabi (block storage for media), Mailgun (for mail sending), Cloudflare (for CDN) and DigitalOcean (for tooling)
- Those normal expenses are quite stable, Hetzner increased somewhat because we've launched some testservers and smaller new instances (like bookwyrm.world).
- Wasabi costs almost doubled, because next to mastodon, we now also host media for lemmy and calckey.world there
- In Oct + Nov, we had another €287 expenses for the foundation setup.
As you can see, donations still cover the expenses. We will see expenses go up somewhat when we have setup the Foundation completely, because we need some extra services like insurance etc.
We might even ask for donations in a post soon, which we don't normally do. For the people who have donated: a big thank you!
For those wondering: donations can be made here: – OpenCollective (preferred) – Patreon