Hi there,

It's past April 1st again, and therefor all information in this update is guaranteed to be 100% true. Or so I hope. Please pay special attention to the last sentence in this update, as action is requested!

It's been rather an uneventful month, the server's been running fine, and although there were a couple of reports the moderators were able and glad to handle them. Thanks again for your help here!

Policy change
This month, Eugen Rochko (founder of mastodon and overlord of the two biggest instances, mastodon.social and mastodon.online) announced a sharpening of his rules, requiring attribution of work of others and disclosing of the work of AI. We had a bit of discussion in our moderation signal group on whether to follow this, and I've come to the following policy statement:

Of course, this policy is only valid within the four virtual walls of the Drum. If and when you feel an account or toot is against the spirit of this policy, feel free to report. Rule 7 has been clarified to include these cases. Mods will mute the toot on the Drum, but unless it is also against a rule on the original server it won't be sent on to the admins there.
 

Financials:
Income:
Donations: € 85,90

Expenses:
Hosting: €42.72
Payment costs: €16.16

Buffer: €698.69

As you can see, the buffer size is now 16 months of hosting costs. That is more than enough to make a donation to the Alzheimer Foundation (the goal selected in last years survey). I will therefor make a donation of €200,00 to them this month.

Current events have also made it clear that the open source community is a network; one on which the Drum also depends. I'm incredibly lucky with your more than sufficient support, but other projects struggle. We're using a stack to host the Drum, and will soon hopefully also be able to use the great work by iftas.org to make the drum an even safer place automagically by using their blocklists.
With that in mind, I propose to change point 4 of our donation rules:

Old version:
4. Every six months, any superfluous donations will be given away, in turn, to support Alzheimer Research and the Orang Utan Foundation, in remembrance of #GNUTerry.

New version:
4. Every three months, any superfluous donations will be given away, to support (open source) projects that help run the Drum, Alzheimer Research and the Orang Utan Foundation, in remembrance of #GNUTerry. 

Please reply to this update to let me know whether you AGREE or DISAGREE to this change. It is your generous gift I'm giving away, after all.

Thanks again for your support, happy tooting and see you next month!