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Monthly Roundup: February 2024

Welcome to our second monthly roundup of whats been happening within our instance & fediverse

Health Status

Had a little blip on the 1st which rendered the instance unreachable for 15 minutes. This was caused by a slight issue during a maintenence update.

Since then we've updated a number of times throughout the month, as 3 critical updates were released requiring us to promptly patch out the vulnerabilities.

We have re-enabled the post translation service, this time powered by DeepL. Not sure why be we couldn't get Mastodon & LibreTranslate to talk to each other.

As predicatible, weekly events such as #Caturday & #SilentSunday were high up on the list, we did see some new topics.

Of course the death of Alexei Navalny was a top topic of discussion leading to #Navalny or other derivatives making an appearence. As was the spam wave mentioned below.

Spam Wave

As you may have been made aware, the Fediverse suffered from a broad spam campaign by bots infiltrating instances with a number of accounts and unleashing voluminous spam posts.

Our instance wasn't directly affected as the bots were unable to create accounts to send out the spam in the first place, but the Federated Timeline as well as some of our users getting mentioned by the bots did mean the spam posts were becoming problematic.

This is the biggest wave we have seen since the creation of the instance, but we are sure we'll have to keep very vigilant as it will not be the last.

Feel free to read more at our blog post: Incident: kuroneko discord spam bots

Finances

Income
Admin Team                  125.00
                Total:    £ 125.00 GBP
Expenditure
Server Costs                 45.83
Email Provider               28.80
Storage Bucket               15.00
Domain Name (£54.84/yr)       4.57
Other Associated Costs       11.57
                Total:    £ 101.20 GBP

Due to currency conversion rates and usage, our Storage Bucket ended up costing us a little less this month. Therefore our costs were down by £8.12 GBP compared to last month.

As mentioned in last months roundup, the Admin Team have decided to increase their contributions in order to slowly start building up a surplus to be stored for a rainy day.

Mentioned above, we envisage that our monthly costs will increase with the addition of DeepL depending on its usage. Will just have to wait and see next month.

Current Balance:          £  23.80 GBP

While it is just a small balance to begin with, we are aiming to have enough stored to atleast cover the costs of 3 months by the end of the year to ratify our commitment to the Mastodon Server Covenant.

Wish To Contribute?

If you would like (and have the means) to assist with the instance's running costs, then you can contribute by using our ko-fi page.

All funds raised will solely be used to help cover the running & upgrade costs.