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Created 2022-11-04
It's been about a week since "The Bird Site" was purchased, lots has been written about that, and lots has been written about Mastodon, but I've not spotted much about the impact of the influx on servers like mastodon.radio, so here are some thoughts. A ramble, so beware.
Mastodon.radio started in 2018, for a long time it ran on a single core VPS with 4Gb ram. Then when an influx happened in the past I finally upgraded it to the current specification, which is 2 CPUs, 8Gb ram, and 160Gb storage.
For a long time I've had it set to require approval for new accounts, this is mostly to stop spam and people who aren't actually wanting a radio amateur focused server (maybe they are a DJ, etc.), and it works fairly well. A week ago we had 807 accounts, and around half were active, the statistics say we have 44% of our users still using the site after 6 months (on average) which is pretty good!
For the most part we got a handful of new users each week, and the community was pretty stable. I follow everyone and could keep up with the local timeline easily.
Chart showing a couple of peaks in 2020 and 2021 but 2022 is significantly higher overall [IMG]
When I was clearing out my emails at the start of October I grabbed this chart from Thunderbird showing the number of emails the server sent me about new accounts per month. You can see it's mostly stable with a couple of spikes, and a large increase in 2022 when Smitty mentioned the server on the Ham Radio Workbench Podcast - also around the time Musk was talking of buying the bird site. Then it trails off back to the usual lower level by October - presumably as people catch up with the podcast!
The specific numbers are:
It's a little tricky to get the maths right, but I think Musk paid approximately $111.11 per monthly active user on the bird site.
Apparently people didn't like this.
In October we had 138 new users.
Reader - I hated it. It has completely ruined my relationship with mastodon.radio.
It used to be a cozy space where I could read about cool things people were doing, see fluffy pets, I could read EVERYTHING - I could refresh my home timeline and there be no new posts.
But then people wanted accounts. If we do some quick maths and assume we would have had as many people join in October as September without the bird situation and compare that to what we had:
138 - 27 = 111 extra new users.
Over four days.
That's nearly 28 per day, on average, and there are only 24 hours in a day.
Remember that I get an email every time I need to approve an account. Even though I've streamlined the approval process quite a lot with my "mastoWelcomer" script I still have to:
1. get a notification
2. notice if it's an account request
3. dismiss the notification
4. open up my ssh client/app
5. connect to my home server
6. go up to the last command
7. run the last command
8. wait for it to load in the account info
9. scroll back and read the username, reason, check the callsign, etc. and make a decision
10. type the number of the account(s) to approve
11. confirm I want to approve those accounts
12. close the app
13. go to mastodon and check it worked
14. refresh the local timeline every so often to see if they have posted an introduction
15. boost their introduction
16. notice, and dismiss, people liking/commenting/etc. on the welcome post
By which point I'd sometimes have had another two or three account requests come in!
After a few days I'd stopped trying to approve accounts as fast as possible and I'm now only checking and doing it if I'm either already at the computer or every few hours, e.g. morning, lunch, before dinner, again in the evening, before bed. I'm still getting around 10 accounts whilst I sleep.
I've also modified my "welcomer" script to only show me accounts that have confirmed their email address. There is no point approving an account if they won't know its been done. Some people confirm really quickly, some hours or days later, some seem to enter invalid addresses that I then try and track down a correction for if it seems easy, e.g. they have a callsign I can look up elsewhere.
I've always introduced everyone to the server, and although I've automated it a bit, I still actively care about and welcome every new users. This has however made my account somewhat useless for me recently, as I have over 200 direct messages and quite a lot of "please welcome" public posts. I can't even find messages I posted myself a few days ago. I'm sure many people who follow me have probably stopped or muted me by now!
The "problem" (for want of a better word) is that none of this is "chunky". It happens all the time. People don't request accounts only between 0900 and 1700, they do it whenever suits them, at least one every hour. And people respond to these new accounts when they see them, not immediately when I post, so there is a long tail of notifications that never seems to stop. I've turned off notifications on my phone, they're still there but it doesn't beep or vibrate. This helps a little, but I've also missed phone calls so it's not a perfect system.
The rest of my life hasn't stopped either, so balancing this with that has been ... difficult at times.
We've had 225 new user, up 704% on the average number of new users, pushing us over 1000 accounts on the server.
We now have 562 "active users", up 90% (although will they stick around?)
15,602 interactions, up 309%, although that's probably mostly me mentioning all the new users.
We've also had zero reports - which is ... good but worrying? Have I curated our block list and membership that well? Maybe! I hope so!
The daily database backup is now over 1.6G with gzip compression!
We've also had a massive increase in donations. The server and domain renew in August but we've already got everything we need to pay for it sitting in a savings account. Which is amazing!
Although we might need that money soon as the next version of the mastodon software has translation capabilities, if paired with a translation service so that's an extra cost for either a service or another VPS (because I think we need to spread the load a bit)
I don't know.
If the pace of new users keeps up, and they all stick around, we're going to have a very different server than we had before. But that's not a bad thing.
What is a bad thing is if the server crashes, I can't fix it, something else happens.
I feel a lot of pressure to look after the experience of 1.03k users (so says the about page as I write this.)
It's the same install of Debian I put on the server in 2018, it's been updated sure, but I still worry about things going wrong and my ability to bring it back. I've never done a full clean install and recover from backups, even on a test server. I probably should, and I'm sure Smitty would lend me one, but then do I want to send all our data to the USA?
To be clear, moderation is not a burden, approving accounts at the usual cadence is not a problem. But I do worry that people think this is a proper enterprise and there is a team of people who know what they're doing. Maybe it should be. But I've struggled to work out how I make the leap from "I own everything, I trust me" to "I can die tomorrow and know a team will keep the server running." Who do I trust with the keys to the kingdom? Who do the users of the server trust? Everyone just trusts me to keep hold of the money they donate and spend it on the server, but no one knows if I do or not. Wouldn't it be better to have a coop run this? Hold the money, be a legal entity that can be trusted with everything?
But I have NO IDEA how to make that a thing.
Plus, I don't have the time! I don't discuss my personal life online, but I have people who depend on me IRL, and a full time job, and I'm the editor for my IRL radio club newsletter, and at some point I might want to actually DO some radio. How do I fit "set up mastodon.radio as a cooperative, find, vet, and induct people to help, etc." into everything else?
Mastodon.radio was a fun idea 4 years ago, now it's a burden, and I don't know how to share the burden.
Do I regret starting mastodon.radio? Absolutely not.
Do I regret not having a more robust technical architecture that could more easily scale etc. yes.
Do I regret not sharing the admin burden sooner? Kind of. I still feel like I'd need someone who I know IRL, has the skills required, is interested and committed to help, and can be trusted - I'm not sure I know anyone who fits that specification.
I've had three, no, four account requests since I started writing this post.
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![Chart showing a couple of peaks in 2020 and 2021 but 2022 is significantly higher overall [IMG]](/kennedy.gemi.dev/archive/cached?url=gemini%3a%2f%2fm0yng.uk%2fimages%2f2022%2f11%2fmastoEmailStats.png&t=638607035910000000&raw=False){kind=link}