This report covers the San Francisco Bay regional Mastodon instance sfba.social, with general statistics, financial details including income (donations) and expenses (hosting costs), moderation efforts, and changes made and being considered.
General Statistics
On June 30th, 2023 we tallied roughly 38,000 friends on sfba.social. This is an increase of about 400 new users during the quarter, compared to the 1,200 friends we gained from January-March. (As a sneak preview for Q3, we added almost 400 more friends in between July 1 and today!).
Financial Details
We are very fortunate in that financial contributions are covering the monthly hosting costs with some to spare. We are continuing to build reserves to sustain the community long-term.
Expenses are mainly monthly hosting costs with Linode/Akamai and some additional cost with AWS:
Our very simple balance sheet:
With our projected burn rate, the running costs of the instance are covered for almost eight months. Our target is to maintain more than 6 months of runway.
As expected, our hosting costs increased by roughly 20% in April due to Linode’s (now Akamai) increase in their pricing.
As always, donations are gratefully accepted at: opencollective.com/sfba-mastodon
Moderation
Moderators work to make sure that the local feed posts follow sfba.social rules. Our moderation efforts rely on users promptly reporting posts that go against our server rules, which helps us quickly deal with issues as they come up. In general, folks at sfba.social follow the server rules well and report users who do not, which the moderation team appreciates very much.
As always, we encourage our users to actively curate their Home feeds using Filters and the Mute and Block tools and to promptly report any content that violates the server rules.
The Admin/Mod team handled 659 reports in Q2. This is an increase of 28% over Q1, when the moderation team resolved 517 reports.
Nearly all reports are resolved within a day.
We actively address bad actors on the federated network by:
- Defederating instances with poor moderation standards or a history of lax enforcement. You can see a list of defederated servers on the Mastodon about page (under “Moderated servers”). Servers marked as “limited” cannot communicate with our server by default, but users can follow and communicate with specific accounts when they know the full account address. Servers marked as “suspended” cannot communicate with sfba.social, with no exceptions.
- Monitoring the #fediblock hashtag to identify servers that may warrant investigation on our part, before they become an issue for our users.
- Monitoring and limiting IP address ranges that produce lots of spam accounts. This does not impose any restrictions on existing accounts, but new accounts from these sources are approved manually.
Team
No changes: the Admin/Mod team is stable and the work load is manageable.
Events
We would like to create more opportunities for our members to meet each other, like event hosted by Club Fugazi in February.. What kind of in-person events would you like to see/attend? Let us know at @announcements@sfba.social!
Technical Infrastructure
Maintenance and Upgrades
- Datacenter migration: as announced in our last report, to prepare for the datacenter migration by Linode, we had to undo our IP failover mechanism for the database cluster. After the migration is completed, the plan is to restore it using the different IP migration feature available in the new datacenter (based on BGP instead of ARP). We are still waiting on Linode to initiate the datacenter migration.
- Upgraded to Mastodon 4.1.4
In progress
- Updating the information hub: continuing work on the instance info site, including an on-boarding guide to help new users get going quickly. As always, changes will be announced via @announcements@sfba.social.
- Code of Conduct: clarified/simplified the rules around pornography and spam.
- Business account policy: updates based on community feedback to the draft policy.
- Terms of Service: overhauling our terms of service and related policies to clarify appropriate uses of the site and content.
- Outreach to local media organizations: drafting an OpEd piece explaining SFBA and the fediverse for local news organizations. If you’d like to contribute or otherwise be a resource, please reach out by messaging the team, commenting on the @announcements post, or email us at support@sfba.social.
Under consideration
- Pixelfed: we are considering adding a Pixelfed service for our photo-inclined users, once Pixelfed’s new feature allowing sign-in with a Mastodon account is live.
Conclusion
We look forward to the next quarter — if you would like to contribute, please donate to opencollective.com/sfba-mastodon
And we always welcome comments!
Your Admin & Moderation team:
@seb @cd24 @moritz @ingurido @jeffkibuule @neuralgraffiti