Mapstodon.Space is growing and needs your support
TL;DR: We are going to upgrade our hosting plan and the monthly bill will increase from €180 to €230. Now's the perfect time to support your favorite instance!
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Our carto Fediverse instance opened its doors in November 2022. For practical reasons, I chose to rely on the great services of @mastohost@mastodon.social, which takes care of server installation and maintenance for a monthly fee. The plan to which we subscribe has been evolving since the beginning, following the progression of the number of users, the database size and the weight of hosted media. Here's a quick graph of the user growth since the beginning:
On January 15, 2024, our 64K statuses (and those of federated instances) occupied 48 Gb of the database. Just over a year later, on January 16, 2025, we had 103K statutes and 57 Gb of database.
We use the Liberapay platform to collect donations to finance the server. We've almost reached our weekly funding target: 44 participants contribute €39/week. Thank you all for your support!
However, the time has come to upgrade our subscription again, as we have exceeded the 60 Gb of storage space allowed in the current plan.
The next plan costs $50 US (€48) more per month, and will therefore increase the monthly bill from €180 to €230 (not including the marginal cost of the domain name). It's a bigger upgrade than usual, which also comes with more extra resources (see here for details of the plans offered by masto.host). We're going to gain 5 extra resources, i.e. 20 processing threads, 20 Gb of database and 200 Gb of additional media storage.
If you appreciate Mapstodon.Space, and you can afford it, please consider supporting it! Even one €/$ a month makes a difference, as the bill is deducted directly from my personal account.
Beyond this call for support, the question of a more sustainable financing and organizational model has been rightly raised for some time. I'm well aware of this, and to move in this direction (as well as to increase the bus factor), I'm writing down some ideas to discuss with those who wish to do so. But that will be the subject of another post on this blog!
Once again, thank you all for your support, and long live Mapstodon.Space!
— To follow the conversation on the Fediverse: @jeremy@mapstodon.space