Sunny Garden Hub

The Sunny Gardener - November 2024

The leaves of two Japanese maples fill in the left and right side, framing the peaked roof of the temple in the centre, and the blue sky beyond. The low late afternoon sun peeks through the leaves on the left which are mostly red, while the leaves on the branch to the right still have a lot of green, but are fringed with red as well.

Increased Activity

Spam

Following previous iterations of similar spam waves, early in the month we saw a new series of spam messages this time posting QR codes in images, making them difficult to filter by text.

There has also been a significant increase in link spam, coming from accounts created manually, instead of the automated accounts seen previously. Things seem to have cooled off for now as server operators clamp down on their local spam accounts.

Election, Twitter

We saw what was possibly the busiest day ever (from sunny.garden’s perspective) on Nov. 6, coinciding with the US federal election.

That, combined with the continuing exodus from Twitter, drove a lot of activity on other social networks including the fediverse.

Six month graph of server sidekiq jobs processed per day, increasing very gradually from about 1M at the beginning of June to 1.3M at the beginning of November where there is a sharp spike up to 2M, and another later in mid Nov.

Summary

An active month, with lots of new users, activity, and spam reports.

66 new users, 564 active users, 83k interactions, 88 reports opened, 88 reports resolved

Hosting Costs

Costs were stable this month, largely unaffected by the increase in activity.

Cost spreadsheet, text follows.

Expand Hosting Costs
sunny.garden 2024-12-01
Main Server 12-32GB-512GB -$84
Worker Server 2-2GB-40GB -$7
Media Storage 300 GB -$11
Media Bandwidth Free $0
Backups 681 GB -$11
Domain Name $35/yr -$3
Email Server -$5
Donations One-Time $30
Donations Recurring $70
Monthly Totals
Previous Balance $119
Total Expenses -$121
Total Donations $100
Balance $97

Canadian Dollars

As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi! There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.

– Brook