Wikis World/2023-12

Hello and happy end-of-year-holidays! It's unfortunately been a while since our last report, and this one is longer than usual as it is also our end-of-year update for Open Collective Foundation. As of 2023-12-19, we're up to 166 users, from the 150 we had about two months ago.

The past two months have been relatively quiet, with the main noteworthy event being several waves of Direct Message spams from various large instances with open signups. Our tools to prevent them without massive amounts of collateral damage are fairly limited, but please continue to send reports if you get any.

Facebook's Threads has started to enable support for ActivityPub (the standardized protocol that the Fediverse uses underneath). Wikis World will not initially federate with Threads; our plan is to wait to see how it goes with other instances and consider enabling federation in limited mode if it won't cause problems relating to the health of our users and the broader Fediverse. We will not be changing how we moderate content for Threads specifically. As usual, please let us know if you have opinions in either direction.

End-of-year updates

1. What did you accomplish during 2023? How did you use money?

We have continued to provide a stable, well-moderated Mastodon instance for our target audience. We have spent money on Mastodon hosting from masto.host (~50 USD/mo today) and on our domain renewal (~25 USD/yr). We increased our hosting plan to reflect the increased traffic and new services needed for search functionality.

We did plan to commission some artwork to celebrate our one-year anniversary, but none of us really knew how to make that happen and in the end ran out of time.

2. What challenges did you face during 2023? What did your Collective learn? How did you change or grow?

Our user count has about doubled during this year from 82 users in mid-January to 166 today, and we recruited a fourth person to the moderation team in April.

The larger Fediverse has also grown quite a bit, partially due to the actions of, um, a certain rich person who bought a certain well-known microblogging platform late last year, as well as our own outreach. The increase in users and instances increases moderation load directly, but also means more Fediverse users and server admins weren't initially attracted to the platform due to its then-non-mainstream approach to scaling and user data handling. This, too, has occasionally led to discussion or even drama between instances, which isn't always pretty.

3. What are your plans for 2024? Anything exciting coming up?

In general, we plan to keep what we're already doing. We've also been floating some ideas to partially automate the sign-up process, which currently involves contacting an individual moderator or admin and having them manually verify who you are and then sending an invite link to you.