State of the Instance (April 2021)
I've decided to start writing monthly updates on what features and changes have come to Cawfee Club and what are soon to come. This has a two-fold effect, since it forces me to work harder. I had the same idea back at the very end of 2019 (see the admin post about it), but only one such report ever materialized. And I quote:
To keep myself motivated, I've decided to start biweekly status reports to keep you updated and keep myself motivated. [...] I'll probably publish those on every other Sunday, starting with the next one. If I don't, kick me in the shins.
Uh oh!!!
What is new
Info pages
This has been planned for a long time - frankly, the site seems to confuse many newcomers. There's a bunch of new concepts like multiple timelines, post settings, all these buzzwords like "Fediverse" and "instances"... what is Pleroma anyway? It can get overwhelming and we had no immediate explanations, forcing visitors to pick it up somehow. Many have probably just left.
So I created these pages. The frameworks and static generators I tried were pretty bloated and didn't give me what I needed, so I created a small static generator from scratch. (No JavaScript at all!) The site is pretty spartan, but does the job.
The main thing missing now is content. I'll be adding several detailed tutorials in the upcoming weeks. There's already a short introductory article covering the very basics. I'll also use this place for monthly status reports (such as this one) or other longer documents that deserve a more permanent, organized place than posts on an admin account.
Ban list
So far, all bans got posted to @admin for the sake of transparency. That's a bit scattered and spammy, so all bans since January 2021 are here in one place. Hopefully the list won't need too much updating.
A couple of new emoji
To celebrate, of course. (Mouse over for emoji codes.)
Pleroma 2.3.0
Mostly bugfixes. (Changelog)
What is to come
New rules
The current rules have been in place almost since the creation of this instance and at the time, I didn't really have a clear idea of what the population would look like or what to expect. Thus, most of the rules are pretty vague and poorly worded. There also isn't a clear line between behavior that gets you banned and behavior that is just best to be avoided.
That's why the rules will be rewritten from the ground up. This won't add any new restrictions that would hamper you from posting as before. Some serious matters like doxing will get explicitly forbidden - just in case - but most of the new rules will be just a clarification of the old.
Higher responsiveness
With all the increased activity, server CPU usage has been getting higher lately. I'm still not sure what to do with it. There could be some performance tuning mechanisms to lower it a bit - and perhaps we'll just need beefier hardware.
To put things into perspective, the above graph shows the server's CPU load over a single typical day (2021-03-31). CPU load basically means how many CPU cores the server would need to service all processes that need it (averaged over a minute). Our server only has a single core, so each spike above 1.0 represents an overload. This could result in delays, or worse, connection timeouts and even error messages in the frontend. This is already happening, although still very rarely.
More tutorials
I plan to go over the main features (posting, interaction with users, timelines, user settings...) and cover them in great detail. Still not sure about the main outline of the posts or how to split all the info between them, but I'll figure out something.