State of The Instance - November 2024
We're continuing to be inundated by new spam accounts. I've been getting around a couple dozen reports each day regarding spammers. This is too high of a volume for me to respond individually to each report, but I am suspending the accounts as soon as they come to my attention, so please continue to report. And thanks for remaining vigilant.
Another thing that has come up recently is the bridge account to Bluesky. I've had a lot of questions regarding this and whether or not we are federating with Bluesky. As far as federation goes, Bluesky is not built on the ActivitPub protocol like Threads is; it uses its own proprietary AT protocol, so there is no way to directly federate with Bluesky from a fedi instance. What the bridge account does is repost things between the fediverse and Bluesky so that Bluesky posts are visible on the fediverse as if they were fedi posts and vice versa. It's fairly simple to use: you just follow (at)bsky.brid.gy(at)bsky.brid.gy. The account will follow you back and then the posts you make on Beige Party will be posted on Bluesky as well.
I first became aware of this account when it was reported for sending unsolicited DMs to people who were liking posts that were being bridged from Bluesky. These DMs amounted to advertisements for the bridge service so I blocked the account for acting like a spammer. However, I subsequently received inquiries from several other party-goers about using the bridge service. Based on this, I lifted the suspension to allow our users to bridge their content to Bluesky.
I've decided to treat Bluesky differently than Threads for two reasons:
1. Bluesky is not on the fediverse and can't federate with use directly the way that Threads can.
2. While there seemed to be consensus about not federating with Threads, I have heard from several people who were interested in bridging their content to Bluesky.
However, if you'd rather not see any Bluesky content, this can be accomplished by blocking the bsky.brid.gy domain from your account profile.
As always, I invite you to share your thoughts on the matter in the replies.
Ok, on to the numbers!
New sign-ups:
In the month of October, we gained 11 new party-goers, for a total of 593 users. Of those, 375 have been active in the last month.
Welcome new party-goers! if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly.
Finances:
For the month of October we received $480.00 in donations. After PayPal fees, that comes out to $424.35. We had $2,331.14 left over from September, so our total available funds for paying the October hosting fees was $2,755.49.
The hosting fees for October break down as follows:
VPS Hosting: $143.46
Foreign Transaction Fee: $3.87
S3 Storage: $12.86
SMTP Relay: $17.00
Total: $177.19
After paying the hosting bills for October, we have $2,578.30 left in donation funds. That's enough to keep us running for over a year, so we are in good shape. Thank you to all who donated!
For those who would like to donate to the ko-fi, you can do so here:
ko-fi.com/drinky
The link can also be found in my bio and on the about page for the site.
And as always, thank you to all the party-goers. It looks like we are heading into some tumultuous times, but those are the times when humor and an appreciation of the absurd are the most important, so keep on Beigein' in the free world!
Beige-bless :bb:
