Basically me and our mods as we get the occasional SPAM account for some gambling service, furniture store, or towing service in some foreign country, The fish are the spammers.
It’s finally July, and it’s time to share a monthly update on the state of our instance. As expected, Sakurajima has grown quite a bit, thanks to its inclusion in JoinMastodon, coinciding with the fiasco at Reddit and Twitter being a bad place in general. You have noticed that our local timelines are getting busier, which is a good sign.
That said, I would like to share a few updates.
Funding
As expected, I don’t foresee funding being an issue in the near and long term. Costs, in general, are under control and with the growth so far, which is good. We are still using the 2-core, 80 GB Shared Linode plan, which costs $24 a month. Of course, more goes into running our service, and our breakdown can be seen on the Funding Breakdown page. The total monthly cost to run our services is $52 a month.
Our goal is basically half of the total cost per month. Since I utilize the service, I cover half of the current monthly cost. That means the break-even point is $24, and we are almost there thanks to a handful of people donating monthly through Patreon. You can help out too, but it’s optional. Anything above the goal will be saved when we need service upgrades. Regardless, services will still be free.
We plan to move registrations to an approval basis once we reach 500-600 active monthly users. Open registration can reopen if the count goes below 400-500. Users on Sakurajima will be able to invite their friends through invite links, bypassing this approval process.
The Elephant in the Room, Threads and Meta
There has been a lot of drama regarding Threads and Meta, which we won’t go through. While I don’t plan to sign the pact as I want to stay out of the drama, we did preemptively block/suspend Threads. This is because there are a lot of concerns about how Meta will do things and, of course, a history of poor moderation.
To comply with the Mastodon Covenant, we are not taking any chances. Also, Meta only appears from rumors that they will only federate with servers they make deals with, so our blocks will probably not do anything but just send the message. On the other hand, we aren’t opposed to Tumblr and others federating as they don’t necessarily have a bad history compared to Meta.
However, we will reevaluate once things get settled down. Maybe only the CalcKey instance will have limited federation with Threads (users can follow users on Threads, but Threads users require approval first by the user to follow back). However, this is very unlikely, given Meta’s past behavior. Despite this, we do not plan to defederate any instance that wishes to federate with Threads. Suspensions are only reserved for gross violation of our TOS and/or Mastodon Covenant. In short, there will never be an open federation on Threads to Sakurajima, primarily due to moderation concerns and Meta being untrustworthy, thanks to its various scandals with Facebook. It will be limited or suspended (currently, it’s suspended on both).
Calckey Server Updates
Our Calckey server at Sakurajima Social is the alternative for those reluctant to join Mastodon. We have recently updated to release candidate 3. It appears to be near its final release sometime this summer. It will also receive a rebranding. While we don’t know what it will get called, we will change all its branding once the name changes.
In addition, the fedi buzz relay is working fully on Sakurajima Social. That means more content will become available in the federated feed that you can discover. Also, the recommended feed will show Urusai Social’s local timeline and our main server at Sakurajima Moe.
Other Updates
As always, our forums are an option if you want an alternative to Reddit. We do plan to create a bot that creates threads when a new episode airs in the future. We do plan to have a bot on our Mastodon. It will notify users in the Fediverse that choose to follow it to see new threads as they are created.
If you have friends still on Twitter and you are on here, you can point them to our servers.
The post Sakurajima Updates – July 2023 appeared first on Sakurajima.
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