More Upgrades!
The Twitter storm continues to swell and in response, we've had to upgrade, yet again.
Jeez Louise, will this Twitter storm ever end? Ten days ago, I wrote about Twitter fallout - round 2 where I talked about our response to the influx of Twitter users and how we’ve had to upgrade our services to cope.
Well, since then the storm has continued to rage on and we continue to see an influx of users coming from Twitter, and elsewhere.
The new numbers
I won’t bore you with all the backstory again. You guys can read that yourself in the post I linked above. But we’re closing in fast on 50,000 total users, and nearly 30,000 monthly active users.
That’s around 6x the amount of active users we had before the Twitter storm. As a result, we’ve had to upgrade the server, again. Here’s how things look right now:
- Database: 96GB
- Media storage: 682GB
- Processes: 9
- Threads: 300
- Monthly hosting cost: $1895.50
If you’re interested, you can read a full breakdown of our funding on the about page.
The response from the community
Donations and new Patrons continue to roll in, and as a result, we continue to keep our head above water, despite the additional upgrades…just about. We’re currently funded for around 3 months.
Thanks to everyone who continues to help #FundFosstodon we really do appreciate it, but this Twitter storm doesn’t look like it’s going to end any time soon. Which means users will continue to flood in, which in turn will likely mean more upgrades. So we still need your help - if you want to help support us, you can find details here.
New moderators
We continue to review and approve every account that requests access to Fosstodon. This is so we can cut down on spam accounts and the inevitable reports that come off the back of them. Believe it or not, it’s less work to moderate account approvals, than deal with the tonne a reports from spam accounts.
All this work has, to be honest, burned out the team (it doesn’t help that I had surgery recently too, so have been trying to focus on my recovery). Both Mike and I estimate that we’re currently putting 4 hours PER DAY into Fosstodon on moderation and admin…EACH. And it’s similar for our mod team.
We all have other commitments like day jobs, families etc. it’s a real strain for all of us. So to help with the burden, we’ve added 2 new moderators to the team - Jan-Lukas Else and Nikita Karamov.
Hopefully this will really help with the burden on the team. Thanks gents for agreeing to jump in and support!
Compensation?
Mike and I have been discussing compensation for the Fosstodon team. In the interest of transparency, I think it’s important to share this publicly. We would love to be in a position to offer some kind of monetary compensation to our moderators. As you can see above, it’s a lot of work.
Fact is, we’re just not in a position to offer that to the team at this point. If the financial supports gets healthy enough, we would love to offer this to the team as moderation really is the cornerstone of what makes Fosstodon so great.
Again, if you want to help support us, you can find details here.
Final thoughts
I think this covers everything I wanted to say. It’s somewhat a brain dump of where we are, but we pride ourselves on being super transparent here at Fosstodon HQ, and we want that to continue.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns about anything I’ve covered here, please get in touch.
Finally, on behalf of the rest of the team, we want to thank you. A community is only as good as its members, so thanks for making Fosstodon the amazing place it is. We hope things here continue to go from strength to strength.