October update
Published on November 1, 2023 by Patrick Dersjant
Happy Birthday Mended Drum!
With this update over October, I am happy to close the first year of the Mended Drum instance. It was on November 1st that I powered on the Drum and added myself as the first user; from November 2nd onwards the server became more populated, and here we are now with 248 accounts, of which more than half are marked 'active'. And there's room to grow, so please do go ahead and invite your friends and other Pratchett-lovers! All supporters should be able to create invite-codes (DM me if this doesn't work), and account creation is open to all with a manual review by our moderation team!
Looking back, a lot has happened in the past year. I won't go deeper into X, Threads, BSky or other social media - here we've seen upgrades to the Mastodon codebase from 3.5 to 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2, steadily adding functionality. If you're using this service via an app, a year ago there weren't that many options and now I struggle to create an overview (now wouldn't that be a nice new todo?). Have a look at this overview of apps instead. Yes, you can run Mastodon on an Apple II if you want, though a gopher bridge is still missing...
Our little server has grown its hardware as well - from the smallest possible VPS Hetzner offered to a medium sized one with extra storage space, and a backup VPS in a different datacenter. We've still been able to keep things as simple as possible, and haven't seen a necessity to create e.g. separate database servers or such for now. Bills have gone up, but you're still too kind for them to make a dent into our buffers. The future is safe, financially!
I've been talking about 'we' - and that's another achievement: Jos, Thomas and Darren have joined the Moderation Team this year, and Iain & Ingvar are my co-serveradmins. With a bit more documentation to be done, operation 'tram' (making sure the server can continue even if something happens to me personally) is almost finished.
Thank you all for the ride and happy tooting!
Patrick
Financials:
With this update over October, I am happy to close the first year of the Mended Drum instance. It was on November 1st that I powered on the Drum and added myself as the first user; from November 2nd onwards the server became more populated, and here we are now with 248 accounts, of which more than half are marked 'active'. And there's room to grow, so please do go ahead and invite your friends and other Pratchett-lovers! All supporters should be able to create invite-codes (DM me if this doesn't work), and account creation is open to all with a manual review by our moderation team!
Looking back, a lot has happened in the past year. I won't go deeper into X, Threads, BSky or other social media - here we've seen upgrades to the Mastodon codebase from 3.5 to 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2, steadily adding functionality. If you're using this service via an app, a year ago there weren't that many options and now I struggle to create an overview (now wouldn't that be a nice new todo?). Have a look at this overview of apps instead. Yes, you can run Mastodon on an Apple II if you want, though a gopher bridge is still missing...
Our little server has grown its hardware as well - from the smallest possible VPS Hetzner offered to a medium sized one with extra storage space, and a backup VPS in a different datacenter. We've still been able to keep things as simple as possible, and haven't seen a necessity to create e.g. separate database servers or such for now. Bills have gone up, but you're still too kind for them to make a dent into our buffers. The future is safe, financially!
I've been talking about 'we' - and that's another achievement: Jos, Thomas and Darren have joined the Moderation Team this year, and Iain & Ingvar are my co-serveradmins. With a bit more documentation to be done, operation 'tram' (making sure the server can continue even if something happens to me personally) is almost finished.
Thank you all for the ride and happy tooting!
Patrick
Financials:
Expenses (EUR) --------------------------------------------- Hetzner, VPS plus storage 39.35 Payment processing fees 16.78 Other costs .00 --------------------------------------------- TOTAL COSTS 56.13 Income (EUR) --------------------------------------------- Donations 107.02 Other income .00 --------------------------------------------- TOTAL INCOME 107.02 Financial Buffer: € 535.36 Required Buffer: € 600.00 Gift to OOF/Alzh: € .00