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

As of the end of March 2024 we tallied roughly 39,000 friends on sfba.social. This is an increase of about 150 new users during the quarter, a bit less than we saw the prior quarter.

Financial Details

Unfortunately, the closure of our financial host on Open Collective has created a dip in income for our community. We are very grateful for our community members, who quickly subscribed to our old/new crowdfunding account on Ko-Fi— you are awesome!

And if you used to contribute to our OC account or haven’t contributed financially at all, please consider contributing to our Ko-Fi crowdfunding account here: https://ko-fi.com/sfba_fedi

Expenses are mainly monthly hosting costs with Linode/Akamai and AWS:

Our very simple balance sheet:

With our projected burn rate, the running costs of the instance are covered for nine months. Our target is to maintain more than six months of runway.

With the loss of the Open Collective Foundation as our fiscal host, we have transitioned to Ko-Fi as an interim measure as we explore other fiscal structures. As explained in our announcement about OCF, this includes exploring whether SFBA should function as a formal nonprofit entity. As always, donations are gratefully accepted at: https://ko-fi.com/sfba_fedi

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 376 reports in Q1, roughly on par with what we had in Q4.

Nearly all reports are resolved within a day, but issues involving more detailed investigation may take several days.

We actively address bad actors on the federated network by:

1. Defederating instances with poor moderation standards or a history of lax enforcement. You can see a list of defederated servers on the 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.
2. Monitoring the #fediblock hashtag to identify servers that may warrant investigation on our part, before they become an issue for our users.
3. 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. We believe aggressively blocking spam sources is one of the reasons the number of reports has decreased.

Team

There have been no changes to the team in Q1 2024.

Events

We would like to create more opportunities for our members to meet each other, such as the Club Fugazi event in February and the SFBA in the park meetup in August of last year. Please let us know if you have any ideas at @announcements@sfba.social!

Technical Infrastructure

Maintenance and Upgrades

• We solidified our hosting of Bookwyrm—the ActivityPub enabled software running our SFBA Book Club (https://sfba.club). It even got its own little SFBA themed icon!
• Upgraded to Mastodon 4.2.7: Read more about the new features here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/releases/tag/v4.2.7
• Datacenter migration: as announced in our last reports, 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 finish the datacenter migration. It’s going to be one year soon…

In Progress

• Hosting PeerTube: We have created the SFBA Theater (https://sfba.video), which is based on the ActivityPub enabled software PeerTube. We are still figuring out the Code of Conduct and Server Rules for this newest service. However, if you are a video creator, feel free to request an account.

Under Consideration

• We are closely watching the development of various fediverse (ActivityPub) enabled software and are constantly trying out projects like Pixelfed and Mobilizon.

Conclusion

We look forward to the next quarter — if you would like to contribute, please donate to https://ko-fi.com/sfba_fedi

And we always welcome comments!

Your Admin & Moderation team:

@seb @cd24 @moritz @ingurido @neuralgraffiti @EverydayMoggie