Happy New Year! This is the monthly transparency report for MontereyBay.social, where we review the operational status of the instance, provide statistics about administrative and moderation activities, and talk about any changes that I'm considering. Every monthly report will re-iterate what we wrote in the first report in December of 2022:
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.
You can find the Transparency Report for December 2022 here.
General Statistics
As of the end of January 2023, MontereyBay.social had 33 members, an increase 3 since January. There were over 4,000 interactions (favorites, boosts, replies) with members' posts on the instance.
The instance is run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) based on the configuration templates published by Andreas Wittig. The web service that hosts both the web site and that mobile Mastodon client apps use to retrieve data served over 214,000 requests, an average of 1,471 requests per hour. The Sidekiq service, which processes background tasks like fetching status updates from other servers, sending welcome emails, and performing periodic updates, processed over 2 million jobs in January. Media files are stored on Amazon S3, and we currently store 464,000 objects comprising 145 Gb of data.
For technical-minded folks, we have a public dashboard on the Operations page.
Moderation
MontereyBay.social currently has one moderator, @paul, who approves all trending posts, hashtags, and links as well as handling any reports from members about content which violates the instance rules. We did not receive any moderation reports from members in January. You can learn more about our moderation policies and what you can do to make your experience on the instance safe on the Code of Conduct page.
Moderation does not take much time right now, but we will eventually need at least one additional moderator for the site. Contact @paul via DM or email at support@obscure.com if you are interested in becoming a moderator.
Policies
Many of the sites like https://joinmastodon.org/ that help newcomers to the Fediverse find a Mastodon instance will only list servers that follow the Mastodon Server Covenant. We would like to be on as many of these listing sites as possible to make sure folks in the Monterey Bay region are able to find us, and we agree with the four points in the Covenant. At this time, however, we don't meet all four of the commitments:
- [YES] Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
- [YES] Daily backups
- [NO] At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure
- [YES] Commitment to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down
We need another person with proven AWS expertise who can access the AWS account where this instance is hosted and fix problems when @paul is not available. This need was reinforced in January when @paul was on vacation with limited Internet access, and a member raised an issue with uploading photos. Thankfully, that problem was not urgent, but if an outage had occurred during that time, it could have taken several hours for @paul to fix. In February, we will put together a list of qualifications for a backup instance admin and will ask for volunteers.
Finances
The operational costs of MontereyBay.social are paid by @paul. We currently do not have any plans to ask members to contribute to offset the operational costs. In January 2023, the average daily cost of running the instance was $2.10 per day for a total cost of $65.01:
We were working on diagnosing some minor performance issues in the first two weeks of the month, so we stored web logs in S3, which accounts for the cost of that service which disappears after January 13th.
We were notified that my AWS Free Tier was ending in early January, but that has not appeared to affect our costs.
Service Changes
Implemented
- We continued to see occasional spikes in web traffic that resulted in increased request processing times and connection errors. We experimented with changing the settings on the web service to allow more concurrent connections with mixed results. On 1/13, we upgraded the web service to 4 vCPUs and 8 Gb of memory. This has reduced the number of connection errors.
- On 1/30, @paul ran a database update outside of the scheduled maintenance window, which resulted in an abnormally high number of connection failures for about 10 minutes. We now know how to schedule maintenance in the AWS console.
Planned
- Andreas has updated the configuration templates to use CloudFront for caching, which should improve performance. We will schedule some downtime to upgrade the service in February.
Gratitude
Thank you to all of the members of MontereyBay.social for youru continued trust and engagement. As always, please get in touch if you have any questions about the instance or suggestions on how to make this site work better for you and the community!
Your admin: @paul
email: support@obscure.com