Hello everyone!  This is the first transparency report for MontereyBay.social following our launch in late November 2022.  I will cover general statistics about the instance, the operational status of the services, moderation highlights and lowlights, the financial costs of running the service, and any changes that have been proposed by members or that I'm considering.  This version is modeled off of the sfba.social Trasparency Report (December 2022) written by Seb.  The format may change in the future, but it will always include reports on costs and service degradation.

One of the key elements of making a community successful is trust.  Being open about the operational aspects of MontereyBay.social is one way that I hope to earn and maintain your trust as a member of the community.  As always, if you have any suggestions or concerns, please get in touch with me at @paul or support@obscure.com.

General Statistics

As of the end of December 2022, MontereyBay.social has 30 active members, an increase of 24 members over the course of the month.  There were over 3,000 interactions (favorites, boosts, replies) performed by members, an increase of over 550%.  The moderation team (@paul, for the moment) did not receive any reports of problematic accounts or servers.

You can see a live operational dashboard which shows the status of the main services that comprise the instance on the Operations page.

Finances

The operational costs of MontereyBay.social are paid by @paul.  The costs of running a Mastodon instance are proportional to the number of members using that instance.  We want this instance to continue growing, so it stands to reason that there will be a time at which the costs will be more than I am able to pay. At that time, we will open up a way for members to make voluntary contributions to help offset the costs.  Regardless of who is paying the bills, we will report on the cost of the instance each month in the Transparency Report. (see related posts from January 5th, 2023)

So what does it cost to run this instance?  In December 2022, we estimate that it costs about $2.06/day:

An AWS account can be running many different services and applications. In order to separate out the costs and billing information for a set of services that are related (say, those that make up MontereyBay.social), each service needs to be assigned a common billing tag, and billing data collection needs to be enabled for that tag.  We only got that set up on December 24th, which is why the graph above only shows the last eight days of the month. In January, we will have a full month of data.  I was notified this week that my AWS Free Tier is ending soon, so we may see additional costs in next month's graph.

Moderation

Moderators work to ensure that the server rules are followed to keep the instance a welcome, engaging, and positive place.  Not all content or interactions require moderation. In fact, most members are able to handle control their own experience using filters, muting, and blocking. The Code of Conduct page has links to documentation for these features if you want to learn more.  Moderators become involved if a post on the instance violates the server rules, which are listed on the About page. Please use the reporting functions on your mobile app or the MontereyBay.social web site if you see content on the site that is in violation of the rules.

Mastodon admins help each other by reporting Fediverse servers that they consider bad actors.  Our moderation team considers these reports and takes action when we feel that these actors will degrade the operations of the site or the experience of our members.  In December, we suspended four Fediverse servers based on public reports of unaccepable behavior from multiple reputable Mastodon administrators.  Three of the servers were reported to be part of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and the fourth is a service that allows anyone to follow accounts anonymously, which bypasses a member's ability to control who can read their posts.  You can find a list of moderated servers on the About page.

Changes

Implemented

• We updated the server rule prohibiting spam in response to a member question to make it clear that we allow promotion of local businesses and events.
• We published this site, hub.montereybay.social, as a place to talk about the operations and policies of the Mastodon instance.
• We upgraded the web service CPU capacity to address a problem with uploading and transcoding videos from iPhone devices (blog post).

Under Consideration

• We have observed occasional traffic spikes on the instance where web requests increase from about 30/min to over 1,400/min.  We will be experimenting with adding a caching layer to handle these spikes (@paul's post on the subject).
• (completed in early Jan.) We will be further experimenting with the resource size and configuration of the web server to improve performance of video transcoding.

Gratitude

I'm very grateful for the people who are taking the leap of faith and joining MontereyBay.social.  It's the beginning of January 2023 right now, and I feel like I'm starting to see the ideas and interactions that I'd hoped for when I set up this instance.  I appreciate all of you, and once again encourage you to get in touch if you have any ideas about how to make this a better place.  Thank you so much!

Your admin: @paul