This report covers the San Francisco Bay regional Mastodon instance sfba.social, with general statistics, financial details including income (donations) and expenses (hosting costs), and moderation efforts.
General Statistics and News
As of the end of March 2025 we tallied roughly 39,146 friends on sfba.social. There has been no growth over the last two quarters.
Financial Details
Expenses are mainly monthly hosting costs with Linode/Akamai and some additional cost with Mailgun and Bitwarden. We moved the object storage away from AWS in January, reducing our monthly expenses.
Our very simple balance sheet:
| Month | Ko-Fi | Open Collective | Income | Expense | Balance |
| 2024-03 | $705.53 | $0.00 | $705.53 | $1,313.06 | $10,805.12 |
| 2024-04 | $578.93 | $0.00 | $578.93 | $1,241.84 | $10,142.21 |
| 2024-05 | $599.38 | $0.00 | $599.38 | $1,256.39 | $9,485.20 |
| 2024-06 | $842.32 | $0.00 | $842.32 | $1,170.41 | $9,157.11 |
| 2024-07 | $855.60 | $0.00 | $855.60 | $1,386.76 | $8,625.95 |
| 2024-08 | $766.44 | $0.00 | $766.44 | $1,187.66 | $8,204.73 |
| 2024-09 | $677.72 | $0.00 | $677.72 | $1,386.79 | $7,495.66 |
| 2024-10 | $1,472.05 | $0.00 | $1,472.05 | $1,549.42 | $7,418.29 |
| 2024-11 | $897.72 | $0.00 | $897.72 | $1,088.10 | $7,227.91 |
| 2024-12 | $957.19 | $0.00 | $957.19 | $1,108.42 | $7,076.68 |
| 2025-01 | $1,178.10 | $0.00 | $1,178.10 | $726.87 | $7,527.91 |
| 2025-02 | $849.39 | $0.00 | $849.39 | $734.56 | $7,642.74 |
| AVR monthly expenses: | $1,167.02 | ||||
| Current reserves in months: | 6.55 | ||||
With our projected burn rate, the running costs of the instance are covered for six months. Our target is to maintain more than six months of runway.
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. We’re grateful for our users who report 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 427 reports in Q1, down from 660 in Q4.
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 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. We believe aggressively blocking spam sources is one of the reasons the number of reports has decreased.
Team
We have added a new moderator to the team: @jeridansky@sfba.social has joined the team and already contributed greatly. If you see Jeri online, please say hello!
Events
We would like to create more opportunities for our members to meet each other. Please let us know if you have any ideas at @announcements@sfba.social!
Conclusion
We look forward to the next year—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 @jeridansky