Currently, on the main instance, people have created 40191 accounts (+214 marked as deleted). I don’t know how many are active because I don’t monitor it, but once again, I greet all of you here :) In recent days, the traffic on the website has been overwhelming. It’s definitely too much for the basic docker-compose setup, primarily designed for development use. I was aware of the possible consequences of the situation happening on Reddit, but I assumed that most people would migrate to one of the Lemmy instances, which already has an established position. I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin ;)
The first step was to upscale the VPS to a higher version (66.91EUR). It quickly turned out that it wasn’t enough. I had to enable CF protection just to keep the website responsive, but the response times were still very slow. At this stage, the instance was practically unusable. The next step was a full migration to a dedicated server (100EUR, the current hardware). It can be done relatively quickly, so it resulted in a 5-minute technical break. Despite the much higher parameters, it didn’t get any better. It became clear that the problem didn’t lie there. I’m really frustrated when it comes to server administration. That was the moment when I started looking for help. Or rather, it found me.
A couple days ago I wrote about how kbin qualified for the Fast Forward program. To be honest, I did it out of pure curiosity and completely forgot because a lot was happening during that time. During the biggest fire incident, Hannah ( @haubles ) reached out with a proposal to help. I outlined the situation (in short: the server is dying, I don’t even know what I need, help! ;). She quickly connected us with Vlad ( @vvuksan ) and Renaud ( @renchap ). I was probably too tired because I don’t know if the whole operation lasted 60 minutes or 6 hours, but after a series of precise questions and getting an understanding of the situation, the guys themselves adjusted the entire job. I love working with experts, and it’s not often that you come across individuals so well-versed in the fediverse. Thanks to Hannah’s kindness, we will be staying there a bit longer. Currently, fastly.com handles the caching layer and processes images. Hence those cool moving thumbnails ;)
Things were going well at that point. I could disable Cloudflare protection. Probably thanks to that, many of you are here today, and we got to know each other a bit better :) However, even then, when I tried to enable federation, the server would stop working.
Around the same time, Piotr ( @piotrsikora ), whom I already knew from the Polish fediverse, contacted me. He is the administrator of the Polish Mastodon instance pol.social, operates within the ftdl.pl foundation, and specializes in administering applications with a very similar tech stack. I made the decision to grant him server access. It only took him a few moments, and he came back to me with a few tips that allowed us to enable federation. In the following days, there was more of it, and we managed to reach the current level. I think it’s not too bad.
Nevertheless, managing the instance has taken up about 60% or more of my time so far, which prevents me from fully focusing on current tasks. That’s why I would like to collaborate with Piotr and hand over full care of the server to him. Piotr will also take care of the security side. Now I have to take this much more seriously. We still need to work out the terms of cooperation, but I want you to know the direction I intend to pursue.
We also need to migrate to a new environment because one server will sooner or later become insufficient. This time, I want to be prepared for it. This may be associated with transient issues with the website in the coming days.
The next two updates will still be about project funding (I still can’t believe what happened) and moderation. The following ones will be more technical, with descriptions of changes and what contributors are doing on Codeberg. I would like to be here more often, but not as an admin, just as myself.
Thank you all for this.
P.S. In private messages, I also received numerous offers of help that I didn’t even have a chance to read and respond to. You are the best!
Love it. I’m sure there are some spam-evaluation services up or starting soon that use AI, but that will also soon be important as we become more of a target.
I’ve been thinking recently that machine learning models could be used as a first-line defense for moderation, e.g. identify obvious spam/violations, but also identify borderline cases that require human intervention. So you could reduce the burden on moderators, and perhaps even shield them from some of the more extreme things, although I think those tend to be more image/video which I imagine will be a lot harder to really effectively harness ML for.
Obviously that’s a tried and tested model with email, but i’m not sure there’s a great way to implement that on federated servers without keeping the model fine tuning pretty secret. Any spam detection AI model that’s public can simply be used to train better spam.
My past experience with this sort of thing suggests it’s probably better to focus on identifying some kind of humanness score. Since kbin instances are responsible for moderating their own user population (I believe) that means they could quite easily keep a good running score of how viable an account is. Some of that could be ML that picks up on both the information content and uniqueness of a post, but you can also infer a good amount by how much interaction it gets with other users who also have good scores.
There’s also some interesting stuff in the upvote structure. If you draw a directed graph of who-upvotes-who then spammers and trolls tend to form much more distinct islands than regular users do.