ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

Elsewhere:

  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
  • 2 Posts
  • 40 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Worth also noting that:

    • We are currently only using about 1/4 of the resources, so people could trim the cost further (although being over specced helps a lot when there are spikes in activity and it will mean we don’t have to upgrade any time soon).
    • Our hosting costs are more that fully covered by around 20 people donating and that should scale with growth (although possibly not in a truly linear way). We also have a decent “warchest” which should see us through most temporary problems.

    One reason we break the finances down is because we are a medium-sized instance and we want to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to run one supported by donations.

    If anyone has any questions they are welcome to message me or they can drop it into the monthly financial report (the new one will be next week).














  • Our instance is federated with hexbear, lemmygrad etc. I want to be resonsible for what I see and block, I’m really not a fan of defederation unless it’s a last resort (i.e. CSAM or other illegal content).

    Yes, that’s pretty much our take on it: we’ll defederate CSAM (and nonce-adjacent) instances asap, those with lax registration tend to become havens for spammers and trolls, so there is usually a wave of defederating, then someone reaches out to them, it gets sorted and we allow them back in. That tends to be the regular defederation and isn’t controversial. Defederating, for example, Hexbear over, for example, trolling would be a bigger deal and we’d try and speak to the other Admins about it before any permanent banning.




  • But I can’t help but feel like there’s another story here regarding the potential risks of the fediverse:

    It’s perhaps the most important story going forward. Rexxit was only a year ago and a lot of instances are gone already. If that’s not sorted out people will start to wonder why they should invest time and effort in an instance or community.

    Admins need to be ready to migrate ownership to others who are willing to take on the financial or user account management burden.

    It was touch-and-go for us on feddit.uk but it all worked out right at the last minute and we’ve been working hard to ensure that everything is set up so that the instance’s future is assured for as long as the users want it. Here is our most recent financial report.

    A lot of problems could be avoided by planning ahead - never rely on a single Admin and make sure that funding is in place (and not being run from any one individual’s bank account - why Open Collective is very good for this). That way, if one Admin has to step down (and you are less likely to burn out if you can spread the load) then there are already others who can pick up the slack.