Mastodon’s moderation tooling is, after using it for a couple of years, … hard to describe in polite language. Normally, this is just annoying, but when a big spam wave hits, it becomes an active hindrance to running a good instance.

2024 was a pretty routine year on chaos.social. Here’s a quick overview of how our finances, moderation, and tech were looking:

2023 was the first year for chaos.social under a proper governance structure with an easy way to donate, complete with regular reporting on our income and expenses. As predicted, not much changed in the day-to-day running of the instance (which is exactly why we chose the governance structure we did) – but here’s a quick overview of how the year went.

Just a very short update: We’ve finished setting up all our accounting with our new governance structure. From now on, you’ll find up-to-date finance information on our money page, updated roughly monthly.

The past month has changed the Fediverse, and, by extension, our instance. We’ve continued as normal (apart from limiting sign-ups) to give ourselves time to figure out which changes were only temporary, what seems to be changed for good, and how to react. A month seems ample time, and here we are with a set of changes in how chaos.social will work in the future.

Our last report on the state of chaos.social was over a year ago, so we’ve written a small update. To make the post helpful for newcomers too, we’re starting out with a bit of infomation on chaos.social itself. Experienced users can skip the tutorial and go to the finances section directly. 😉

Nothing’s ever quite free in the world – let’s take a short moment to talk about the finances of chaos.social.

chaos.social celebrates its birthday today! We opened registration last year on April 15th after sending our first toots on April 13th: