Hello Reddthat! We are back for another update on how we are tracking. It's been a while eh? Probably because it was such smooth sailing!

In the middle of February we updated Lemmy to v0.19.9 which contained some fixes for federating between Mastodon and Lemmy so hopefully we will see less spam and more interaction from the larger mastodon community. While that in of itself is a nice fix, the best fix is the recent thumbnail fix! Thumbnails now have extra logic around generating them and now have a higher chance of actually being created! Let us know if you think there has been a change over the past month-ish.

Budget & Upcoming Migration

Reddthat has been lucky to have such a great community that has helped us stay online for over a year and if you can believe it, in just a few more months it will be 2 years, if we can make it.

Our costs have slowly increased over the years as you can all see by our transactions on OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/reddthat). We've managed to reduce some costs in our S3 hosting after it balooned out and bring it down to a more manageable level.
Unfortunately as well, the current economic issues have resulted in the Australian dollar slipping further and as we pay everything in USD or EUR it has resulted in slightly higher costs on a month-to-month basis..

Our best opportunity to keep online for the foreseeable future is to downsize our big server from a 32GB ram instance to a 16GB ram instance which will still provide enough memory that we will be able to function as we currently do while not affecting us in a meaningful way.

This means we'll need to reassess if running all our different front ends are useful, or do we only choose a few? Currently I am looking to turn off next and alexandrite. If you are a regular user of these frontends and prefer them please let me know as from our logs these are the least used while also take up the most resources. (Next still has bugs regarding caching every single image).

We can get a vps for about ~A$60-70 per month which will allow us to still be as fast as we are now while saving 40% off our monthly costs. This will bring us to nearly 90% funded by the community. We'll still be slowly "losing" money from our open collective backlog but we'll have at least another 6 months under our belt, if not 12 months! (S3 costs and other currency conversion not withstanding).

All of this will happen in late March early April as we will need to make sure we do it before the current contract is up so we don't get billed for the next month. Probably the 29th/30th of I don't fall asleep too early on those days.
It'll probably take around 45mins to 60mins but if I get unlucky maybe 2 hours.

Age Restriction

Effective immediately everyone on Reddthat needs to be 18 years old and futher interaction on the platform confirms you are over the age of 18 and agree with these terms.

If you are under the age of 18 you will need to delete your account under Settings

This has also been outlined in our signup form that has been updated around the start of February.

Australian & UK Policy Changes

It seems the UK has also created their own Online Safety Act that makes it nearly impossible for any non-corporation to host a website with user generated content (USG). This is slightly different to the Australian version where it specifically targets Social Media websites.

Help?

I would also like your help!
To keep Reddthat online, and to help comply with these laws, if you see content or user accounts which are under the age of 18 please report the account/post/content citing that the user might be under the age of 18.
We will then investigate and take action if required.

Thanks everyone

As always keep being awesome and having constructive conversations!

Cheers,

Tiff!

PS. Like what we are doing? Keep us online for another year by donating via our OpenCollective or other methods (crypto, etc) via here