With the summer over, it's time to have another update. August was a quiet month serverwise, possibly also because I decided not yet to upgrade to 4.1.6.
At the beginning of the month I sent out a questionnaire to all contributors, and the results are now in. Thanks to you all for participating! General vibe - especially from the open questions - is that you're happy with the way the Drum is run!
Let me share some more detailed results. First, social media usage.

From the data, it's clear some of you have completely switched to Mastodon, but most respondents use two or more social networks (addicts, y'all!).

There's a balance in the use between web interface and apps, however most use Third-Party apps rather than the official one (I can understand...). Only web users can see the Ook! button, though...

Important to me is how you would balance costs, performance and features:

My takeaway is that you value a good performance for a good price, and would generally love new features but only if they're stable. On the question of which new features you'd like, full text search and a separate admin-account for announcements score high. I deliberately asked whether you'd like certain features that are available in other, forked, Mastodon versions (like glitch), but the interest for these was low. All in all, I feel reinforced in my approach, but please keep providing me with feedback!

So what will the autumn bring? Well, somewhere in September I expect 4.2.0 to be released. This will bring the much desired full text search, which I will enable. Downside is that resource usage will be (much) higher, so I will want to upgrade the server. I'm currently thinking about the best way to do this with minimal downtime, and whether to switch to a dedicated server instead of the current cloud based shared VPS. The new version will also hopefully introduce role badges, allowing you to identify admin(s) and moderators. I will probably also introduce a separate admin account for announcements at that time, but am torn between 'flavouring' this account (CMOT comes to mind) or making it easily findable even for people not familiar to the Discworld canon. To be continued.

Finally, the finances. Nothing fancy to see here!

Expenses                               (EUR)
---------------------------------------------
Hetzner, VPS plus storage              26.08
Payment processing fees                16.72
Other costs                              .00
---------------------------------------------
TOTAL COSTS                            42.80

Income                                 (EUR)
---------------------------------------------
Donations                              89.52
Other income                             .00
---------------------------------------------
TOTAL INCOME                           89.52

Financial Buffer:     €    486.25
Required Buffer:      €    600.00
Gift to OOF/Alzh:     €       .00

I have decided to up the required buffer a bit. This is due to feedback on the questionnaire to absolutely make sure the Drum can continue, and my wish to move the Drum to a more performant infrastructure later this year (see above).