July 2025
Published on July 9, 2025 by Patrick Dersjant
Hi there,
After the heatwave seems to be before the heatwave, so here we go with another quarterly update on the Mended Drum!
Technical developments
Again, in this quarter the Drum has been running fine. However, we do sometimes run into technical issues, such as images not loading. We're busy tracking down the root cause for this and have developed a (manual) workaround, so if you notice this happening drop any of the admins a note and we'll kick some. It appears to be an issue with intermittent connectivity at our hosters end, which the server doesn't know how to recover from gracefully.
We've succesfully upgraded the Drum to Mastodon version 4.3.7, and are now also using bucket storage. That migration went pretty well, which is only good as a couple of extra upgrades are around the corner. The server itself has to be upgraded, we want to upgrade our database version, and Mastodon 4.4.0 has been released which we also want to move over to as quickly as possible. Expect this to happen sometime during the summer holidays. As it's not quite straighforward and I don't want to rush it before heading off on a family holiday, it'll be August rather than July.
Finances
Financially, the Drum had an exceptional quarter. We've even had a one-time contribution of €50, for which we are eternally thankful! Thank you all for your continuing contributions!
As our buffers are filled enough to be able to survive 12 months without donations, I've been able to make the following donations this quarter:
€250,00 Alzheimer Research
€100,00 Yunohost
€50,00 Mastodon
Thank you all!
This quarters financials:
Income
After the heatwave seems to be before the heatwave, so here we go with another quarterly update on the Mended Drum!
Technical developments
Again, in this quarter the Drum has been running fine. However, we do sometimes run into technical issues, such as images not loading. We're busy tracking down the root cause for this and have developed a (manual) workaround, so if you notice this happening drop any of the admins a note and we'll kick some. It appears to be an issue with intermittent connectivity at our hosters end, which the server doesn't know how to recover from gracefully.
We've succesfully upgraded the Drum to Mastodon version 4.3.7, and are now also using bucket storage. That migration went pretty well, which is only good as a couple of extra upgrades are around the corner. The server itself has to be upgraded, we want to upgrade our database version, and Mastodon 4.4.0 has been released which we also want to move over to as quickly as possible. Expect this to happen sometime during the summer holidays. As it's not quite straighforward and I don't want to rush it before heading off on a family holiday, it'll be August rather than July.
Finances
Financially, the Drum had an exceptional quarter. We've even had a one-time contribution of €50, for which we are eternally thankful! Thank you all for your continuing contributions!
As our buffers are filled enough to be able to survive 12 months without donations, I've been able to make the following donations this quarter:
€250,00 Alzheimer Research
€100,00 Yunohost
€50,00 Mastodon
Thank you all!
This quarters financials:
Income
Donations € 373,81
Expenses
Hosting costs € 141,65
Payment costs € 60,33
Donations €400,00
Total expenses € 601,98
Total buffer: € 490,50 (12 months of hosting costs)*
* Note for the careful observer: yes, this is less than four times this quarter's hosting costs, because some extra money was spent on extra vps's for testing the upgrades.
Expenses
Hosting costs € 141,65
Payment costs € 60,33
Donations €400,00
Total expenses € 601,98
Total buffer: € 490,50 (12 months of hosting costs)*
* Note for the careful observer: yes, this is less than four times this quarter's hosting costs, because some extra money was spent on extra vps's for testing the upgrades.