theATL.social Financial Report for July 1 to August 1 2023

Greetings!

This post will be the first in a series of ongoing financial reports for theATL.social's services, which primarily include theATL.social (Mastodon) and yall.theATL.social (Lemmy) sites.

But first, thank you 🤗 to the contributors that fund operations of theATL.social. Without you, the services provided on these sites would not be possible.

To establish or change your contribution, visit the OpenCollective contributions site

Expenses this month totaled $231.02, an increase from last month's $197.46. The increase was due to an upgrade in specs for the Mastodon API Server, the server costs for the Lemmy Server (currently housed on only one server), and a $10 Patreon donation to the Mastodon organization.

Pledged Contributions (net of Stripe processing fees) are $148.98, for a monthly deficit of -$82.04.

Additional contributions to make up for this deficit are greatly appreciated! Even a $5/month contribution can make a difference.

On the server costs, they're too damn high. I've tried running lower spec-ed servers, but doing so was resulting in multiple multi-minute outages per day when the Mastodon API was unable to manage temporary increases in traffic. Glad to answer any questions on this.

I have seen some promising 100% compatible Mastodon forks and API implementions that address the relatively high computing overhead needed to operate a Mastodon instance. Although none are immediately implementable, the development direction is trending positively.

And in any event, the upcoming version 4.2.0 of Matodon utilizes Ruby 3.0, whose improvements vis-a-vis Ruby 2.x should allow the de-scaling of servers, based on dramatic improvements in Ruby on Rails efficiencies.

Comments? Questions? Feel free to ask away in the thread below!