State of the Instance 2024

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

tl;dr: Everything’s fine. Running chaos.social is a lot of work, but we’re managing.

Accounts

New accounts can only be created with an invite from an existing account, so we’re thankfully growing only slowly. There were 873 new accounts in 2024:

Of course, total account numbers aren’t terribly interesting, because as on most social media platforms, many/most accounts are inactive. Mastodon provides statistics on “active accounts” which count any login in the past month as activity. We’re at 6433 active accounts, which is roughly 100 fewer than we had at the same time last year (so no significant change).

Moderation

We had 2345 reports in 2024, which is more than double the previous year’s 1083 reports. This is mostly due to an increase in Fediverse activity and in Fediverse spam. We have some helper scripts that make use of trustworthy reports – we’ll publish another blog post on the specifics soon-ish.

6.5 reports per day on average are starting to add up to noticeable amounts of work, but still within reason.

Tech

Under the hood, there were no big changes in 2024. We ran some small Mastodon updates that went smoothly. The big 4.3 update led to a bunch of work on account of our custom design changes that went out the window, though. We also had some intermittent server problems for a while, when one of our servers overheated and slowed down as a result, which took a bit of debugging to even find (and then resolve).

The largest change in our infrastructure was when we moved media files (uploaded images, videos, etc) to a separate server. This became necessary because when a user with followers on many different instances posts an image, all those instances will request the file at the same time, which can be tough when it’s a video. On the new server, we can handle peks of 10Gbit/s without any problems.

Money

Last year, we had to ask you for less money to avoid paying a ton of extra taxes. This worked well, thank you! As we had to pay the big set of taxes for 2023 last year, the end result is looking nearly perfectly balanced:

With EUR 7620.74 in donations (our only source of income) and EUR 6795.82 in expenses (servers, taxes, bank fees), we ended up with a profit of EUR 824.92. That’s perfect – a small buffer, but not too much. Our real buffer is in our (honestly ridiculous) savings, from which alone we could keep the servers running for another three and a half years.

As always, you can also look at the breakdown of our income and expenses on our finance page, which we tweaked to include a proper annual overview in addition to the monthly updates.

And that’s it

If you have any questions, ping @ordnung or send us an email :)