Hey, What's Up(date)?
Published on November 10, 2023 by Sam Wight
Hey folks! Hope you all are doing well 😁
It's nearing the end of the year, and our fiscal host (the Open Collective Foundation) requires us to do a yearly update on how the past year's gone, what some of our challenges were, and where we're going next. So here's a quick update reflecting our first year in operation as a Mastodon server!
It's nearing the end of the year, and our fiscal host (the Open Collective Foundation) requires us to do a yearly update on how the past year's gone, what some of our challenges were, and where we're going next. So here's a quick update reflecting our first year in operation as a Mastodon server!
What did we do during 2023?
2023 was the first full year of operating our Mastodon server! In November of 2022, Zak and I decided to start a Mastodon server as various completely unrelated things were happening on Twitter. We bought a domain name, set up a server on Masto.Host, and waited for folks to arrive.
And boy did a lot of people join! We had thousands of folks joining and trying out our server, getting involved in its community, and lots of work to do to keep the server humming along. During our first year of operation, we had 499 submitted and resolved reports, currently more than 1,000 monthly active users, and 122 individual contributors.
To that last group, thank you so, so much. Your generous contributions have allowed our server to continue running for free for a group of more than 1,000 people. The small amount of monthly contributions we get sustains an audience of thousands. Think about that for a moment.
As a collective on Open Collective, our finances are completely public, but here's a quick breakdown of where your money went:
And boy did a lot of people join! We had thousands of folks joining and trying out our server, getting involved in its community, and lots of work to do to keep the server humming along. During our first year of operation, we had 499 submitted and resolved reports, currently more than 1,000 monthly active users, and 122 individual contributors.
To that last group, thank you so, so much. Your generous contributions have allowed our server to continue running for free for a group of more than 1,000 people. The small amount of monthly contributions we get sustains an audience of thousands. Think about that for a moment.
As a collective on Open Collective, our finances are completely public, but here's a quick breakdown of where your money went:
- Server hosting fees for Masto.Host
- Fees for a PO box + separate phone # for our DMCA agent
- Domain registration fees
- Art for the server (our elephant riding a bike!)
- Server hosting fees for our sister server (odd.town) that we are in the process of winding down.
It still shocks me just how financially sustainable we are. Less than 10% of our users are current active donors. Yet we receive enough in monthly donations to not only cover the current month's expenses, but another month's as well. That means that the longer we all donate, the more money we rack up and the longer the server can remain open. At our current Masto.Host plan + our current balance of $1740.16, we have more than 14 months of expenses stashed away right now. That is insane.
So thank you to all of our donors and all of our users. Y'all are the people who make this possible :)
What challenges did we face during 2023?
Honestly running a Mastodon server isn't too challenging on the face of it. Most of our job as admins is putting in some upfront effort to moderate servers, and then sitting back and making decisions as various reports come in.
However, there were a few key things we struggled with and grew from in 2023:
However, there were a few key things we struggled with and grew from in 2023:
- Server scalability - Mastodon had several large usage spikes throughout late 2022 and 2023. As a smaller server we weren't hit too hard, but there were months where we had to pay double our normal fees to Masto.Host (purely because of the number of MAUs we had). Figuring out when and how to budget that was a bit of a challenge.
- Hosting a sister server - I (Sam) decided to try starting a Firefish server to be a sister server to Urbanists.Social. It turns out it takes a lot of energy to run and maintain a separate server on top of a very successful Mastodon server. Unfortunately while we weren't able to sustain it, we did demonstrate that we are very capable of following the Mastodon server covenant and giving minimum 3 months' notice for a shutdown.
What are our plans for 2024?
Going into 2024, not much is going to be changing. Our number of MAUs has declined a bit since our peak (2000 MAUs down to about 1000, but it's remained steady since). Our server could use a bit more work and some elbow grease to keep things going. Along with that, expanding the mod team is likely to be a key area of concern for us in 2024. While Zak and I are very much able to keep up with the moderation workload, it would be nice to have redundancy to reduce bus factor. So expanding that will be key as well.
Again, thank you all for a wonderful 2023, and we're looking forward to a bright and wonderful 2024 with you as well. This server has been truly fantastic to be able to run and it means so much to us that you've made Urbanists.Social your home on the Fediverse. Thanks!
Again, thank you all for a wonderful 2023, and we're looking forward to a bright and wonderful 2024 with you as well. This server has been truly fantastic to be able to run and it means so much to us that you've made Urbanists.Social your home on the Fediverse. Thanks!