Hi folks, 

Our apologies for sneaking in this annual update under the gun, but Open Collective kindly reminded us that we really must tell you what your funding has accomplished.

We used your money to pay for Mastodon hosting costs with Masto.host, and we renewed our Jawns.club domain name! (Currently using NameCheap for our registrar.) Not gonna lie, our biggest accomplishment was surviving this freaking year.

We added "please describe your images" to our etiquette tips, and we updated our custom CSS to highlight images lacking image descriptions in the web interface.

Alex approved a lot of new user applications! Nelson manually approved many trending posts, hashtags, and news links in the "# Explore" tab. We both responded to reports from Jawns and the wider community, with Alex usually quicker on the draw.

We survived multiple waves of people fleeing Twitter/X, Reddit and other corporate platforms as they repeatedly showed contempt for users and developers and dared them to leave. Many people found (at least temporary) homes at Jawns.club or elsewhere on the fediverse.

As the fediverse grew, so did moderation problems, as new users joined new servers. We began experimenting with block lists, importing from sources we trusted without manually verifying every server suspension. https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub/updates/block-lists

Some sources then demonstrated questionable judgment, so in the future we will only import block lists that list "receipts", i.e. documenting why they suspended a given server with copies of the offending text. (This is not possible to display publicly in some circumstances, because the ban-worthy content is illegal and morally reprehensible to view, such as CSAM.) We currently only import server blocks from Seirdy's Fedinuke list, where you can see receipts at https://seirdy.one/posts/2023/05/02/fediverse-blocklists/#fedinuke-entries

As the fediverse grows, we also spend more money on infrastructure due to increasing costs of connecting to fedi and storing content from every server we connect to. Hosting costs increased from $69/mo at the beginning of the year to $99/mo now, and it looks like we might have to upgrade our hosting plan again soon. We haven't asked for money every time hosting costs went up, but now is a good time to remind you to please renew or increase your donations if you can, and tell your friends on Jawns.club (or even elsewhere in the Philly fediverse) to chip in what they can.

Our next priority is adding at least one admin/mod to the team. (Stay tuned!) We will also welcome help with organizing in-person meetups and creating merch to sell to help support/publicize Jawns.club, and any other projects, whether or not you are an admin. Nelson wants to experiment with a federated events calendar for Philly, under the Jawns.club umbrella if admins and members agree that's a good idea. What would you like to see from Jawns.club?

We also plan to continue proactively blocking Threads, as we have been since P92/Threads was announced. Sorry we didn't publicly announce our stance sooner, we will release a longer post on the subject later. We are excited to apply the same moderation standards to huge corporations that we apply to every other Mastodon server.