This report covers the San Francisco Bay regional Mastodon instance sfba.social, including general statistics, financial details including income (donations) and expenses (hosting costs), moderation efforts, and changes made and considered.
It has been wonderful to welcome all of our new friends and neighbors. We have expanded our server capacity and refined our moderation process, including a new version of the code of conduct and updated the server rules to match. This has helped to improve expectations and free our users to be nice and have fun!
General Statistics
We don’t have exact numbers about how many friends we had at the beginning of the month, but it was somewhere around 2000. Then, a great influx happened. By November 30 we tallied roughly 31,800 friends on sfba.social.
Financial Details
Income: The Friends of SFBA donated a total of $3,905. (Subscriptions on our Ko-Fi account are at $492 per month.)
Expenses: Hosting costs for SFBA.social:
| Expense | Amount |
|---|---|
| Linode Server Hosting | $500.53 |
| AWS Cloudfront (CDN) | $681.08 |
| AWS S3 (Media Storage) | $53.76 |
| Total | $1,235.37 |
With currently projected growth and burn rate, the running costs of the instance are covered for two more months. We are considering adding merchandise to help cover additional server costs, but anticipate that donations will remain the largest source of funding for the server. We are targeting 6-months of funding reserve.
You can Support SFBA here: https://ko-fi.com/sfba_fedi
Edit: After this report was published, we were approved for OpenCollective. This tool allows greater transparency with our funding. Please donate on the SFBA Open Collective page instead: https://opencollective.com/sfba-mastodon
Moderation
Moderators work to make sure the sfba.social rules are followed, but each user may have more specific things they don’t want to see. Our new friends appear getting into the practice of actively curating their own feeds with Filters and the Mute and Block tools, as well as promptly reporting users or posts that go against the server rules.
The Admin/Mod team handled 680 reports in the month of November. This is a stark increase over October, where the moderation team resolved 21 reports. Our ability to respond to these reports has been greatly helped by an additional moderator. Most are reports are resolved within 24 hrs.
At the end of the month, there were 4 open local reports and 5 reported on remote instances, and 0 pending appeals.
While our user number increased 1,922%, the number of reports only increased 1,400%, indicating positive behavior. We appreciate both nice behavior and prompt reporting!
Note: Many reports include the violated server rules, but not all applications support reporting specific server rules yet. The moderation team has contacted several app authors to encourage support for selecting server rules when filing reports.
Changes
Added Admin/Mod Team Members
Our team expanded, with @moritz and @ingurido joining @seb and @cd24, to help with technical and moderation efforts.
Revised CoC & Server Rules
Due to the tremendous increase in friends and necessary moderation actions, we further clarified our server rules and created a more general Code of Conduct, which we published on our newly created Community Hub. Our current Server Rules can be found here: https://sfba.social/about
Improvements
Implemented
- Increased Server Capacity: At the start of November, SFBA.social was running on three Virtual Private Servers (VPS). During the month, our fleet has quadrupled to 12 VPS. We have added additional VPS for new services such as translation and search. We have also added a database replication to improve the performance of API and web clients.
- Added full-text Search capability, enabling users to search favorites, boosts, posts, and bookmarks by their text content. It does not provide search for the whole instance nor search across all instances on the fediverse.
- Added Translation button (only available on the website) to render posts from other languages into English. Currently supported languages: Italian, Ukranian, Russian, Irish, Japanese, German, Indonesian, Swedish, Dutch, Korean, Finnish, Persian, French, Portuguese, Slovak, Polish, Turkish, Spanish.
- Started monthly reporting of statistics, finances, and changes.
- Begun the registration process with the US Copyright Office to receive and respond to DMCA requests. (Additional information about our DMCA process is available on the community hub under DMCA Requests.)
Under consideration
- Adding a “Mastodon, by example” guide to the information hub to help new users get going quickly.
- Adding additional language to the Code of Conduct to provide ways for local businesses to engage without overwhelming the timeline and allowing users to opt-out. (Would be announced via @announcements account).
- Further refining server rules; they currently reflect our Code of Conduct, but could be simplified.
- Forming a controlling organization (non-profit) to formalize governance, and improve transparency.
- Increasing the character limit on posts, which is currently 500 characters.
Thanks for being here on sfba.social – We look forward to the next month and welcome any comments! If you would like to contribute, please donate to our OpenCollective! to our KoFi: https://ko-fi.com/sfba_fedi
Edit: After this report was published, we were approved for OpenCollective. This tool allows greater transparency with our funding. Please donate on the SFBA Open Collective page instead: https://opencollective.com/sfba-mastodon
Your Admin & Moderation team: