Attention Beige Party-goers!

State of The Instance - October 2024

It's been a while since I've done one of these. If you've been following my posts you'll know that life has gotten in the way in a big way, but I've still been maintaining my spreadsheets so I want to get everyone up to date on where we are with the finances. In order to be less confusing, this post will be just the numbers for September, and then I will include the numbers for July and August in replies to this post.

In the July update I floated the idea of adding a new rule regarding attribution and identifying AI content. I am going to back off from that for now. I could see it complicating a lot of things both for the party-goers and me as the moderator, and ultimately I don't know if it would be mitigating any actual harm. Large language models exist, and will continue to exist, regardless of whether we as individuals use them. If people are using AI-generated content to mislead people, we already have a rule to handle that, so I think adding an additional rule is going to needlessly over-complicate things. As for the attribution portion of it, I also don't want to become the originality police. As far as copyright goes, I am required by law to respond to DCMA takedown notices, but beyond that I don't really want to be playing detective when it comes to who posted what first. Quite frankly, the moderation workload is heavy enough without adding that to my plate.

However, I still think adding attribution when you know it is the right thing to do, and identifying AI-generated content is helpful for people who want to know if what they are interacting with is the work of a human being or a mass-plagiarizing algorithm. I'm going to treat this like I do with CWs. In most cases, where not explicitly mentioned in the rules, CWs are not required, but it's a good idea to add them if you think the content could be triggering to some people. The same goes for attribution. I'm not going to enforce it with moderation action, but I will encourage it as part of being a good citizen of the fediverse.

On a similar note, I have been seeing an increase of anger and general mean-spiritedness cropping up lately. I recognize that as a moderator I'm constantly seeing the worst cases, so I try to keep that in mind that my perspective is necessarily skewed towards the negative and trust that most people are having good experiences on here. But there has definitely been an uptick in reports on posts that aren't strictly rule violations but do make me cringe a bit. It's beyond my power as an administrator to force people to be nice to each other, nor would I want to, because I understand that shit is bad all over and people are justifiably frustrated, scared, and angry. I'm not advocating for toxic positivity, just to recognize that the people who you interact with on here, even the ones you disagree with, are in fact human beings, each with their own shit going on and who are mostly just trying to make it through the day like everyone else.

This in no way should be construed as a means to excuse toxic behavior. All people deserve a baseline of respect and dignity, but their harmful actions do not. If you see that kind of behavior, please report it so that I can take moderation action. All I would ask is to try to treat others with a measure of compassion and grace and to consider that even if you disagree with them, that is not the defining aspect of their being.

Trust me, I get it. I've written off entire swathes of my family because of ideological differences. Things are falling apart and we are as polarized as we ever have been, and not just along the standard right/left political lines. But if we're ever going to make things better, we're going to have to find a way to do it together, even if we are not 100% in agreement on every ideological point. For those who would say that revolution is the only answer and we just need to tear everything down and get rid of those who are not sufficiently ideologically pure, I would humbly submit the entire history of political revolutions since 1642 and their human cost as a rebuttal.

Ok, that's it for the fun stuff, on to the numbers!

New sign-ups:

Between July and September we gained 76 new party-goers, broken down as follows:

July: 13
August: 40
September: 23

The overall total is 545 users. Of those, 321 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 September we received $295.00 in donations. After PayPal fees, that comes out to $254.30. We had $2,257.43 left over from August, so our total available funds for paying the September hosting fees was $2,511.73.

The hosting fees for September break down as follows:

VPS Hosting: $147.52
Foreign Transaction Fee: $3.98
S3 Storage: $12.09
SMTP Relay: $17.00

Total: $180.59

After paying the hosting bills for September, we have $2,331.14 left in donation funds. That's enough to keep us running for about 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, and happy 2nd Beigeversary! Normally I'd never want to belong to any club that would have me as a member, but I will make an exception for you fine folks.

Beige-bless