strangeobject.space blog

One Month

At the end of November 2022 we launched our Mastodon instance at strangeobject.space. In this post I want to review how that launch went and give an overview of what our first month of operation was like. Let's start with some current numbers over the last month as of January 2nd 2023:

I started setting up the instance in the last week of November and spent about two days getting it all to work before launching. I wanted to do things right from the start in order to save us later trouble. For example a common issue with new instances is that they start by storing media attachments on the main server's file system. This quickly becomes a problem because media files are by far the largest storage need for a Mastodon instance. If you forget about this you can easily run into an issue where your file system is 100% full which leads to all kinds of failures and can be extremely hard to recover from because you may not even be able to login via SSH anymore. Moving those files later can also introduce problems if not done correctly, so preventing all these issues was a high priority.

Like many instances, we use an S3 compatible object storage service for our media files. This removes pretty much any storage issues since capacity is effectively unlimited. It comes at a cost though: traffic, especially outgoing traffic (so, when people actually look at an image for example) is expensive while storage is cheap. This is how these services make money. We save a lot by routing all our media traffic through the web server on our server (Nginx) and caching them there pretty aggressively. This has a bit more initial setup effort but gives us the best of both worlds: cheap storage and cheap traffic from our server host. We only pay for the S3 traffic when a new file is uploaded and once when it's requested the first time within a certain time frame. And since social media sites strongly trend towards recent content, it's very likely that files will only be fetched from S3 storage once before they disappear into obscurity. Even if they get dug up later again, it's not a big issue since they get cached again. This keeps our S3 storage/traffic bill at an almost negligible cost.

Then there was the usual basic server setup: user accounts, firewall, security things. And of course setting up Mastodon itself which is actually pretty straight forward and mostly well documented. Overall I've put about 16h of work into the initial setup. I benefitted greatly from many years of experience in this area though. Doing all this right will be much more difficult and time-consuming for a beginner.

Speaking of cost, here's our expenses so far, apart from labor:

On average we end with about 10.00€ per month. This is likely to increase slightly as our media storage needs go up but it won't be dramatic. The domain price will also increase after the first year.

I'm trying to roughly keep track of our labor as well as it's easy to forget about that. After the initial setup we had approximately nine more hours of technical and moderation effort across two admins, @james and myself.

In terms of moderation it's been relatively quiet. There were incidents of targeted harassment that we resolved by suspending some instances that were host to hateful content. We had a couple occasions when we had to remind people of our instance rules but those were mostly resolved easily and without major intervention, with one exception which resulted in the immediate suspension of a user due to severe violation of our rules.

Moderating a space like this that's pretty much public and aims to accommodate a wide range of people is an interesting exercise in evaluating my own views. Sometimes there might be posts that I personally don't appreciate, that may even be uncomfortable for me but as a moderator I have to put my personal sentiments aside and focus how content relates to the rules we have set and the kind of space we want to build.

I'm confident that we can keep growing organically. 100 active users in the first month is not bad and it has shown that the moderation effort at this scale is still small. As the number increases we will eventually also have to increase the number of people doing moderation but we're still pretty far from that point.

It's also been hugely helpful to collaborate with other instance admins. Sharing which instances are sources of harassment and hateful content makes keeping our space in good shape so much easier. Especially when starting out, being able to inherit some well proven block lists from bigger and older instances that I can trust was an invaluable help.

Let's see where 2023 takes us. How big this space will be by the end of the year and what we'll have learned in the process. See you around. 💜