The Sunny Gardener - January 2025

Zuckerberg Up To No Good

A combination of Meta announcements and leaks, and Mark Zuckerberg himself kissing ¹ the boots ² of the incoming Trump administration has lead to a significant increase in users leaving Meta platforms for alternatives such as the Fediverse and BlueSky.

Pixelfed in particular saw some impressive growth as a result of the exodus from Instagram, as well as launching some new mobile apps.

Translation Feature

sunny.garden has been using the free tier of the DeepL translation service, and on Jan 12th, we hit the limit (500,000 characters) on the free tier, which caused the Translate function to stop working for a little while.

I temporarily switched to a paid DeepL plan while I worked on setting up a self-hosted LibreTranslate server, and switched from DeepL to LibreTransate on Jan 26th.

It’s fair to say that in a lot of cases, the translations provided by LibreTranslate are not as good, but there are a couple of reasons I decided to take this path…

First, at our current rate of usage, a DeepL paid plan would cost somewhere around $30/mo. while the entire rest of the server, DNS, email, backups, everything costs around $120. This is a pretty steep price for a single non-essential feature.

And second, using a self-hosted server has some privacy benefits, as the contents of a translated post remain on the server, instead of being sent to DeepL for translation.

Hopefully the LibreTranslate results will be good enough in most cases.

Mastodon Project Re-Structuring

The Mastodon Project has announced that Eugen Rochko (“Gargron”), the founder and creator of Mastodon, will be stepping down as CEO and taking a more product focused role, as well as transferring copyrights and assets to a new non-profit organization.

I’m moving to Canada!

This is a joke, unless you are a DNS registry.

The sunny.garden server itself has been hosted in Quebec, Canada since mid 2022 by France based company OVHcloud, but still relies on a handful of US based services.

DNS

The domain name had been registered with Namecheap, and the DNS served from DigitalOcean, both US based providers. Namecheap and DigitalOcean have honestly been great, and if you’re ok with US hosting, I would recommend them. But given all the things, I thought it was time to further reduce our reliance on US providers.

I’ve now transferred the domain and DNS services to canspace.ca which – you may be able to guess – is based in Canada.

email

I run my own email server, which is currently hosted in the US on Vultr, and this is the email server that sunny.garden uses to handle account registration, notifications, etc.

Self hosting email is tricky… not every hosting company will allow you to send email out to the internet, and some of those that do allow it are widely blocked by other email providers, making it difficult to deliver email to anyone. Beyond that, it’s also important to acquire a “clean” IP address, one that hasn’t previously been used for sending spam, so that your server isn’t already on spam block lists before you send a single email.

I have started the process of setting up a new mail server in Canada hosted with OVHcloud, but this will take a while. Partly because setting up an email server can be complicated, and partly because it can take 1-2 months before other email providers begin accepting mail from a new email server, as a spam prevention measure.

Backups

The server is backed up daily to multiple data centers, on two different storage providers. One of those providers is in the US, but the backup is encrypted, and cannot be accessed by the storage provider.

Since the backup is encrypted, I’m less concerned with that for the time being, but moving this copy of the backup to a Canadian or EU based server is on my list of things to do.

Summary

As mentioned above, the Fediverse saw a significant influx of new users this month across the board.

sunny.garden started the month with 537 active users, and ended with 738. This is the biggest increase, and highest active user count since the big wave of Nov 2022.

It’s possible that this surge has peaked, and that the monthly active users will taper off now. In general, only about a third of people that register continue to actively use their account. But in some cases it just takes time for people to get around to it, or they may return to it months or even years later when they remember it’s there.

Hosting Costs

The cost for the domain name registration has increased somewhat to $55/yr, as a result of moving from Namecheap to canspace.ca.

The temporary switch to a paid plan for DeepL translations added $19 of additional charges this month. Since I’ve now switched to LibreTranslate, that extra charge will be for this month only.

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