State of the Instance (April 2024)
Long time no hear! It's the first update since May but nothing noteworthy happened until December anyway. Let's summarize those last few months.
(I actually had a full draft ready at the end of February, ehehehe.)
December 2024 - maintenance
So as outlined in the last update, a lot of cruft accumulated in the database and it REALLY needed a proper clean up. That finally happened on the 22nd of December, more or less as described in the link. About 62 GB of space was freed, which surprised even me!
To do the maintenance, I had to double our secondary storage used for media, backups, offloading of less used database chunks etc. Luckily it's dirt cheap. This will ensure that we won't run out of space for a good while!
During the migration, I also cluelessly deleted some empty database files, which were actually there for a reason. This broke the deleting of posts and the undoing of reactions/likes/etc. for a few days. That was fun.
February 2024 - spam
Later on, some Japanese communist wankers decided to "troll" fedi as a whole, so you probably got a lot of mentions for a week or two. That was also "fun", I'm glad it blew over so quickly.
March 2024 - open registrations
The maintenance was the main reason why I didn't want to open registrations just yet. Now that it's done, the gates are open!
Well... half open. When signing up, you now also have to enter a reason for registering. After that, it's up to me to approve or reject your application. This should keep out the spammers and obvious bad actors. As of now, however, the UI for me to approve it is hidden in a separate frontend, which is accessible only through the admin account and I get no notifications whatsoever.
The main Pleroma UI should eventually show the applicants to me. For now, let's just hope that I'll get used to checking it.
Federation update
Pedophile instances keep popping up so I keep banning them on sight. They're not worth individual mentions but the log is here, if you're curious.
Just for illustration. I don't care how ironic this is, I don't want this stuff to touch my server.
Operating costs
From June to October, the costs were $39.50 USD just as in April and May.
| Operating costs for November 2023 | |
|---|---|
| cawfee.club (server) | $30.00 USD |
| cawfee.club (block storage) * | $3.92 USD |
| old.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| 001.testing.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| Total | $40.92 USD |
* Upgraded on 2023-11-14.
| Operating costs for December 2023 | |
|---|---|
| cawfee.club (server) | $30.00 USD |
| cawfee.club (block storage) | $5.00 USD |
| old.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| 001.testing.cawfee.club (server) * | $3.50 USD |
| Total | $42.00 USD |
* I keep forgetting to nuke it.
From January to March 2024: $42.00 USD, same as December 2023.
So what's next?
I guess I could update Pleroma after I thoroughly test it on the staging server. I'm just scared of custom emoji reacts.
Speaking of that - although this is three months old news by now...
FIVE YEARS OF CAWFEE CLUB
Wow! Can you believe it? It got here so fast!
Stick around. :)