This report covers the disabled.social Mastodon instance. Included in this report are general statistics, financial details including donations and operating costs, moderation efforts, and changes made and considered.
First off…a big hearty welcome to everyone who has joined us on disabled.social! We hope that you are finding it to be an inviting and safe space so far. We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes trying to make sure things are running as smoothly as possible, all while learning a new platform.
Also…welcome to our first transparency report! This is a report that we plan to publish quarterly, but may end up publishing more frequently depending on the level of growth and activity on our instance. The transparency report is a way for us to communicate with our member base about what is going on behind the scenes a little bit.
Since opening our doors on 11/11/2022, we have:
- expanded our server capacity - twice!
- set up a way for people to donate to keep us operational
- hired a volunteer moderation team to protect the space
- modified the rules and best practices based on community feedback
- began the process of figuring out how to moderate talk around disability and sexuality
- began the process of setting up the knowledge repository
If you have any questions about anything in this report, please contact any one of us via DM on disabled.social. The handles of the admin and moderation teams can be found at the end of this report.
General Statistics
As of 12/27/2022 and looking back for the past 30 days, we have almost 1,800 active users and around 83,000 interactions! We had a few big notable influxes. The first was obviously when we first opened the instance to registrations. The second one happened due to the announcement of suspended accounts being let back onto Twitter. Since then, there has been a steady influx of new registrations every day.
There has been some question as to why we require a registration question to be answered. We require a registration question to be answered because it helps to filter out the spam and it helps to evaluate intentions. This is less of a concern for individuals and more of a concern for other people wanting to join our instance, including companies, charities, non-profits, attorneys, medical professionals, etc. We have recently added an additional requirement for registration that requires members to not only share why they want to join the server, but also how they intend to use the space.
Financial Details
Income: Subscriptions on our Patreon account are up to $185/month.
Expenses: Total costs for the month of November for disabled.social amounted to $87.28:
- Email services: $7.50
- Server costs: $75.35
- Domain services: $4.43
The costs will vary for each month depending on usage. Our next quarterly report, due at the end of March, will contain the expenses for December 2022 and January-February 2023.
You can financially support disabled.social here.
Moderation
Administration vs Moderation
There has been some confusion about the difference between moderation and administration, and we would like to clear that up. The administrators have the following duties: pressing buttons in Mastodon, on the server, in Cloudflare, doing the coding for the upcoming blog, organizing/running meetings, approving/rejecting accounts, writing guides, modifying rules/best practices/terms of service/privacy policies, and other organizational things. Moderator duties include investigating reports, handling appeals, investigating instances that might need to be limited or suspended, and making sure that the disabled.social rules and best practices are followed.
Reports
Since the opening of the instance, there have been 49 reports opened, 39 of which have been resolved.
Defederation
There have been some questions on how we decide which instances to block. The system we use to block is not perfect, and it is a balance between two questions: do we underblock and run the risk of a security incident or worse or do we overblock and then go back through and unblock if we made a mistake? At the moment, we are operating more towards the latter, but trying to incorporate some strategies that bring us more towards the middle.
There is a hashtag, #fediblocks, that the moderators and admins follow to get ideas on what instances need to be blocked. Depending on the urgency and the reason for blocking, we may or may not have time to investigate first before making a decision. Initially, when we set up the instance, we basically used the list from #fediblocks to set up the block list. That block list was around 1000 entries long. Sifting through that by hand, is impossible, given the other demands of all of us. That’s where you, the members, come in. If you are trying to reach out to someone and you can’t, check to see if they are on the block list which you can find at the bottom on the server about page (you must have an account and be signed in to view).
We also rely on tips from members on which instances that possibly need to be blocked. We also watch other trusted instances that we know have a diverse moderation team. The process certainly is not perfect, but we are trying our best!
Mutual Aid
One of the moderators, Aidan, has taken the lead on setting up a bimonthly (twice per month) mutual aid thread that members can share their requests on. This is in addition to members’ own toots asking for mutual aid. You can either check for the threads on their account, or any of the mods or admins as they will be boosting them. If you wish to help, please review the request and aid in whatever way you can. And boost the post too, for more visibility and increase the chances of people getting help!
Changes
Implemented
- Decreased admin team by 1. Our admin team decreased by one due to unfortunate comments that were made prior to joining the team. Our admin team now consists of Ashley (@PanickedFoodie) and Chris (@McCullohMD). We are still looking for one more admin member. Contact us if you are interested!
- Put together a mod team. We recently put together a moderation team. Please welcome Valerie (@madtastically), Emily (@emily_rj), Aidan (@Aaidanbird), and Chris (@dabbspsych)! We have had a few meetings to go over things, and they are already off and moderating! :)
- Upgraded server setup. Initially we started off with a single, dedicated Linux server with 4GB of RAM. About half went to managing Mastodon and the other half went to managing the database. This held up well for the first several days that we were online. However as new users flooded in, the instance began slowing down. The components that make up Mastodon’s stack require a fair amount of memory and CPU processing power, and it became clear within our first week that we would quickly have to expand in order to keep the instance online and responsive. Our initial plan was to double our memory and disk space, however as we watched the server resource requirements continue to expand, it was clear that wouldn’t be enough. We decided to expand to two larger, separate servers: a dedicated Mastodon app server with 8GB of memory, and a larger database server with 24 GB of memory. Both also had more than double the previous disk space.
This initially held up well. And while the CPU and memory have continued to be adequate, as we’ve brought on more users we have seen increased disk space requirements.
Mastodon requires a lot of local storage for caching. It is designed to keep a local copy of every avatar, image, document, file, etc, that is posted. It does this so that all of the users on each instance can simply retrieve the local copy, rather than every single account in the Fediverse retrieving every object from the posting server. The idea is to distribute the burden of serving content, rather than force small instances to have to serve data to thousands of users. However, with every user that joins the instance, with every account that is followed, with every toot that has a cute Caturday image or the latest popular photos, that leads to more local disk space requirements.
When there was another influx of users in mid-December that increased our daily task processing queue by 50% in four days, it pushed us over the edge.
The de facto standard for Mastodon admins is to routinely clear this local cache automatically, and only retain data from within the last seven days. This is what we were doing. Until our 160GB drive was completely full. When the drive completely fills up, the server can’t store temporary data or write to logs, and that can cause those annoying 500 errors that you’ve all seen.
We started by changing the daily cache clearing from keeping the last 7 days to only keeping the last 5 days. Then we started clearing it twice a day. Then we dropped it to only the last 4 days. Then we started clearing it every hour. Even then, our drives were filling up within the hour. This solution was highly inelegant - it resolved the full disk issue, but at the cost of spiking network and CPU usage. As the instance did not have local copies of assets, it would then have to re-retrieve them from other places. And write them to disk again. Although it freed up disk space enough to let the server stay up, it also created serious performance problems.
The options we had were to again expand local disk space or look to unlimited storage. Local disk space is the cheap, quick fix - however with a two-day cache requiring over 100GB, it was clear that limiting ourselves to a larger disk of a fixed size would likely run into the same problems as we continue to grow. The second option is what we chose, as unlimited storage will simply grow as our needs grow. In December, we moved all of the cache and media files from local storage to Amazon S3 object storage. This has eliminated our disk space challenges, and allowed us to return to the standard local cache of seven days. We have continued to add more users, and server performance has remained high with no recent 500 errors.
We are continuing to aggressively monitor resource utilization, and are planning for further expansion so we can stay ahead of the curve moving forward. And we cannot tell you all how much we appreciate your support and patience as we’ve experienced these growing pains. They’re great problems to have, and we are working hard to minimize the future impacts!
- Rules clarifications. As we get into the swing of things, there are sometimes going to be situations that lead to rules clarifications. Click here for the updated rules and best practices.
- Sign ups. One of the situations that kept arising was people other than disabled people that wanted to join the server. So companies, non-profits, charities, attorneys that represent disabled people at SSI/SSDI hearings, medical professionals with a business, etc. (Note: some of these were run by disabled people). When deciding on whether to admit or not, we take into account why they want to join in addition to doing a background check. However, that might not be enough. After some discussion, we decided to change the sign up rules a little bit and add in a requirement that people need to specify how they are going to use the instance. This allows us to better assess intent.
- Mutual aid. Recently there have been some accounts reported as spam because they were asking for mutual aid. After some discussion, we decided to put in an explicit section detailing why mutual aid and fundraisers are so important to the survival of our community, and that they are allowed on our instance. Hopefully this will clear that up.
- Commitment to non-commercialization statement. For transparency, we (admins and mods) decided to make a statement that regardless of what we do for work, research, or advocacy, that we will individually never try to commercialize the space.
- Best practices update.
- Screen readers. After consulting the disabled.social community, we came up with a new set of best practices specific to screen readers to try and make things run as smoothly as possible. In addition to requiring alt text, some of the other suggestions were to avoid using multiple emojis in a row, if you are going to use emojis in your screen name use as few as possible, use camel case for hashtags, etc. You can read the full list of updated best practices for screen readers here.
Under Consideration
- Age restrictions. We are in the process of working out the details on age restrictions for our community and how best to implement those.
- Boundaries around NSFW content, and sexual education surrounding disability. We are in the process of figuring out the guidelines for this.
- Setting up knowledge repository. We are in the process of choosing a blog theme and getting it set up, so that we can create a central resource for living as a disabled person. Keep an eye out for more details on this!
Thanks for being here on disabled.social! We look forward to interacting with you all in the fediverse. If you have any comments or suggestions on how to make the community even better, please don’t hesitate to contact us. And if you would like to contribute to our efforts, please donate to our Patreon.
Your Admin & Moderation team: