Keeping up with regular transparency reports has been a challenge. I want to be open about the operations of the site, though, so instead of saying "sorry", I'll just get us up to date.
General Statistics
As on June 2023, MontereyBay.social has 39 members, 19 of whom are classified as "active" meaning that they have used the site in the last month. We remain open for new registrations, so tell your friends about us!
The instance is run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) based on the configuration templates published by Andreas Wittig. We updated the site to run Mastodon 4.1 on February 16th (blog) to get important security and performance fixes. Since that time, the web service that hosts both the web site and that mobile Mastodon client apps use to retrieve data served over 4.6 million requests, an average of 1,860 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 12.3 million jobs in the same time period. Media files are stored on Amazon S3, and we currently store 517,000 objects comprising 106 Gb of data.
For technical-minded folks, we have a public AWS dashboard where you can view current performance metrics of the entire Mastodon service.
Moderation
MontereyBay.social currently has one moderator (me, @paul) who approves all trending posts, hashtags, and links as well as handling any reports from members about content which violates the instance rules. I check and approve trending items daily. Since January, we have received six reports for accounts that were in violation of our service rules. None of these accounts were located on MontereyBay.social, and all of the reports were automatically sent to the moderators on the accounts' home servers. In most cases, I suspended the account and/or removed offending content from our instance. If you have any questions about a report that you have made or our moderation policies, you can message me @paul or at support@montereybay.social. Our moderation policies are posted on the Code of Conduct page, where you can also find tips on what you can do to restrict content yourself and make your experience here safe and fun.
Moderation does not take much time right now, but we will eventually need at least one additional moderator for the site. Contact @paul at the links above 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 fully meet the covenant because we do not have a backup admin. An admin needs to have proven AWS expertise and the ability to fix problems when I am not available. Please get in touch if you are interested in being a backup admin!
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. Since February 20th, 2023, the average daily cost of running the instance has been $2.93 per day, or about $92 per month.
I may look into ways that we can reduce spending on the database services. These costs are not a financial burden.
Service Changes
Implemented
- We added a relay to BigRelay.social on April 20th, 2023. A federation relay is an intermediary server that exchanges large volumes of public posts between servers that subscribe and publish to it. It can help small and medium servers discover content from the fediverse, which would otherwise require local users manually following other people on remote servers. BigRelay.social currently exchanges content with 291 Mastodon instances, and their policies align well with our server rules. If you see any improvement in search results or, more importantly, experience any problems as a result of the posts coming in from BigRelay, please message @paul.
- We set up email addresses for support@montereybay.social and paul@montereybay.social.
Planned
- We will schedule some downtime to upgrade the instance to Mastodon 4.1.2.
- We are considering increasing the post size to 1,000 characters.
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@montereybay.social