Hey peeps,

I wanted to take the time to talk about our numbers for Spectra video. 2025 was a huge year for growth, and the momentum only ever seems to increase. Let's break into the numbers, and then talk about our future plans for the instance.

Spectra is getting really big. Here's a quick breakdown:

That's pretty massive! Our instance continues to have a really positive reputation on the Fediverse, and we're continuing to see 4 or 5 new accounts requested every few days. Even though our instance is in the lower end of the Top 20 PeerTube servers on FediDB (as measured by Monthly Active Users), we're still holding steady as a fan-favorite community for creators and viewers alike!

With the rise in members and content hosted, Spectra is facing an upwards challenge regarding hosting costs. Here's a breakdown of our most recently monthly server bill:

In other words, our monthly expenses are ballooning up to nearly $500 per month, which is less than ideal. We're currently looking at more cost-effective options, as Linode / Akamai pricing is pretty aggressive. For the time being, we're not currently settled on a singular service option, and have to do our homework. Your contributions continue to help us along!

Spectra now has a new brand and logo! Historically, we've just ran with something that was thrown together in a very short amount of time, with the idea that what we had was simply "good enough for now".

 

The old branding tried to emphasize on the federated / decentralized nature of our project, but never exactly felt like a "good" logo that communicated any particular idea. After a lot of experimenting and revisions, our brand design is now much more reminiscent of the RSS icon, with some inspiration taken from input and output cables for A/V setups. We've ended up with something that looks nice, scales decently to a browser icon, and communicates our dedication to video, media, and sharing.

Now that we're at the start of 2026, we're committing time and resources to help address one of my biggest personal pet peeves in the video part of the Fediverse: finding good stuff to watch. In the past, I've written about how difficult it can be to find creators and followers in this space. While things have slowly gotten better in an organic sense, I believe that there's more that can be done.

We're starting off with manual video curation by launching a dedicated PeerTube channel for the instance. In addition to producing high-quality how-to explainers for PeerTube users, we will also be building a curated playlist of interesting videos we've found all around the Fediverse, as a general starting point. Our goal here is to eventually incorporate this playlist into a special section of our home page, with "Staff Picks" videos getting called out to help aid discovery. If you have recommendations or are interested in helping build out this playlist, please reach out!

All things considered, Spectra is still doing pretty great as a community project! We're still growing, and figuring out how to address the growing pains, and want to take bigger steps towards promoting not just the great content from our instance, but from the wider community as well. As always, we are always open to feedback and recommendations.

Best wishes,
Sean Tilley