I know other instances have grown a lot due to media attention, reddit making silly decisions or banning communities. Did anything similar happen or is this just a thing that thinged?
Edit: having a closer look, some of the names I thought were new are people who’ve had accounts for years but have mostly been posting to other instances so I didn’t see them. So maybe I’m only seeing them on higher-scoring local posts
afaik we’re still around 150~ visits per day, it’s just us in here 😄 i suspect until the admins agree to list the site on google/bing growth will be negative/sideways
We’re pretty protective of our ~500ish regulars. We are not a large instance, but our users are very engaged. We don’t want them to be drowned out by a massive influx of new accounts utterly shifting the vibe of the site overnight.
It’s already a problem of us both being Perth-based: we’re weak on admin coverage first thing Eastern Time as that tends to be 3am-7am here. An explosion of users and an early morning incident is something it’s just easier to avoid.
At the end of the day, we’re a pair of nerdy full-time family guys doing this as a hobby. We aren’t interested in monetising this site or making it our jobs.
Well i hadn’t considered that, but perhaps i should’ve considering the effect that one bot account has had.
Are donations still meeting costs? You say not monetising, but it shouldnt be a charity.
Costs aren’t actually that high when the nerd labour is free. Hosting costs were around $200/mo last time I looked. It’s really a @lodion@aussie.zone question, though.
I’m travelling for work again… and will be again quite a bit in the near future. When I’m home and have some time, I’ll answer this properly.
Short version: I’m paying the bulk of costs out of my own pocket at the moment. The bulk of once off donations were used up a few months back. A few monthly supporters offset it a little. I’ll figure out the numbers and share when I can.
There is no way you should be paying that on your own. I thought things were good with once a year payments, but i’ll look at setting payments up for monthly instead. I’ll increase the amount as well.
Edit: So monthly doesn’t seem to be available on Kofi in many options, i’ll just top the kitty up more now and increase the amount paid annually from next July, if that suits?
Yeah, i think Lodions a great steady hand on the tiller. For me, i feel like AZ could become the basis for a wider ‘fediverse first’ set of social media alternatives for Australians. That would take more active growth and discussions and actions on direction in that vein. Lodion has a different vision to me on this projects development, and Lodions the lead on this experiment, and we’ve hashed that out before.
There are definitely practical, time consuming administrative hurdles that Lodion and Nath have highlighted that a user and cheerleader like me rarely notices, i think this is a key driver behind the non-listing. The only thing i can say to that is there seems a fairly technologically knowledgable and engaged set of people on AZ that might be willing to muck in to support the project in material administrative ways. There are some particular users that i’m surprised aren’t admins from the beginning tbh, but thats my ‘on the outside looking in’ assessment of a situation i don’t really know about.
yeah I was looking to setup a piefed instance just to keep touch on how much admin is involved but I can barely commit myself to mod, let alone run a server in my spare time
It must be time consuming, especially due to the constant monitoring.