Fosstodon vs Twitter - Round 2
Fosstodon has been dealing with the great Twitter migration, again. Here's an account of what happened from our perspective.
Woooooh! It’s been a crazy few weeks at Fosstodon HQ. If you’ve been living under a rock (or are just not interested) Elon Musk, or better known as Melon Tusk on the fediverse, has taken over Twitter and looks to be on a mission to ruin the platform even more.
Because of this, people have been flocking to Mastodon in their droves, and since Fosstodon is one of the biggest tech-focussed instances on the fediverse, we’ve seen A LOT of that traffic.
TL;DR
If you don’t want to read about the back story, here’s the TL;DR (too long, didn’t read):
- Over the last 10 days we have served over 140 million requests
- The number of members on Fosstodon has doubled from 20,000 to 40,000+
- All of the team have been pulling a second full-time job to cope with the demand. So much so that we ended up taking shifts!
- We have had to do a number of server upgrades, which has resulted in our hosting costs rising from around $250/month to $1,000/month
- Mike and I were interviewed for WIRED
- Microsoft’s lawyers reached out to us to take down an account, clearly a sign that we’ve made it 🤪
- Our community have been fantastically understanding by supporting us through all the slow downs and outages, as we’ve have constantly fought to keep the lights on, and also with their financial support. Thank you, everyone.
Actually, I don’t really need to go into anymore detail, those are all the salient points. Needless to say it’s been a horrendous few weeks and we’re still seeing a lot of traffic, but that may just be the new norm.
I’ve updated our funding page with a breakdown of what our costs and funding currently look like. Thanks to all the financial support, we have managed to keep our head above water. Just about.
We currently have 4.7 months worth of funding, so we’re still a ways off our 6 month funding target. If you want to throw a few bucks into the tip jar, we’d be every so grateful:
Wrapping up
Thanks to Melon Tusk, things on Fosstodon look brighter than ever. We have a growing and even more diverse community of passionate techies, and we’re really proud of that.
Finally, I wanted to say thanks to all of you, our members, for the continued support. Fosstodon would be nothing without you fine people. ❤️