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Created 2022-12-10
It's been around a month since my "Thoughts on the TwitterMigration" post and things seem to have calmed down again, so I thought I'd take some time to pull together some thoughts and numbers for you all.
After 4 years of fairly steady increase in users mastodon.radio got an influx.
We went from less than 100 new users per month to 111 joining in the final 4 days of October, or 28 per day.
I wasn't enjoying the constant barrage of notifications and requests.
In November 2022 mastodon.radio added 1071 new accounts. That's more than double the total accounts that joined in the entire previous 4 years. It's 34.5 per day.
Impressively 64% of those new accounts have logged in during the first 10 days of December, which is pretty impressive "retention" considering we're early in the month.
We now have nearly 1,700 "Active users".
New users create a lot of email, before we'd comfortably sent fewer than 1000 emails each month, in November we sent nearly 14,000
Also on the backend is Sidekiq, it does all the fetching and sharing of posts, likes, boosts, etc. and it took some tweaking to get working well under the new load.
For the previous months Sidekiq processed around 50-60k jobs per day, now it hovers between 750k and 1.2 million jobs per day.
We've also seen a HUGE increase in donations. I have nearly £1,500 in an account ready to pay for all those emails and server upgrades.
This was inevitable, even if we hadn't had any more users there is now a lot more traffic on the network and sidekiq is busy, so we needed a server upgrade to keep up.
Mythic Beasts have hosted us from the start and when I emailed to ask what they could offer I got a pretty quick reply and a very good offer. We were basically able to double the server power (now we have 4 CPU cores!) and pay only a little bit more.
Some quick maths shows it costs just under 20p a year per user to pay for the server and domain and a modest amount of email.
There were a few things that made the initial influx very hard work. For one I personally welcome every new user to the server, and approve all the accounts.
I made some changes to the way I do this, the main one being to make our mascot, Alex, send the welcome messages. This freed up my personal timeline and mentions to be usable and not just a flood of "welcome to mastodon.radio!" messages. I also made some changes to the script to streamline the actual process of approving the accounts.
This helped a lot, I still get emails when a new account is requested, but I'm much more lax about dealing with them now and don't jump on approving every one as soon as I can.
I've also turned off a lot of notifications, so I don't get pings for every boost or like etc. which makes the experience of not using mastodon.radio (you know, the time I'm NOT on the laptop or phone) much more pleasant.
One of the big changes was a bunch of other instances starting up, including mastodon.hams.social, qth.social, and hackers.radio. I hear rumours of national radio associations also looking to set up instances for their members.
This is great as is spreads the community our and stops mastodon.radio being THE mastodon server for radio people.
Behind the scenes we've got a good alliance of admins who talk about issues, moderation, etc. which is very helpful.
We've also got a relay set up which ensures posts from mastodon.radio get to hackers.radio, and vice versa, without everyone having to follow everyone on every server. It also helps posts with hashtags be reliably "findable" across the servers connected to the relay.
The relay server also runs LibreTranslate so we have some basic machine translation of toots.
Much more comfortable, if mastodon.radio collapses in flames then so what? It's social media not a bank. I'm confident I could stand it back up again, even if we didn't keep all the data for whatever reason (the daily database backup files are now 2.5G gzipped) plus there are other servers that people could jump to if they REALLY can't not have mastodon for a bit.
It's really good to see new instances coming online and sharing the ethos.
It's still just me running the server, which isn't ideal, but it's absolutely not just me running amateur radio fediverse servers.
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