It's been a good year for PlasmaTrap all around. :) I'll recap some stuff that happened throughout the year here, show some data, and share the current setup and other things.

User influx

PlasmaTrap has grown to 178 users by the start of the new year; at the time of writing, we're already at 184. There are over 40 daily active users now.

Needless to say, it makes me very happy that people like my little corner of the internet enough to trust their presence on fedi to me.

A small look at the financials

It's no secret that it's a pretty poor financial decision to run a fedi instance if you want more than the basics for it. It also requires a lot of time investment and technical knowledge. Donations usually cover ~27% of the running costs of PlasmaTrap. I can easily shoulder this because I have a full-time software development job, but it is still one of my most significant monthly expenses. The lion's share of the expenses incurred are electricity and hardware maintenance. Power costs have risen a frankly ridiculous amount in Germany, so my electricity bill has more than doubled in costs over the past two years. PlasmaTrap uses a server from Hetzner to do caching and serve the instance to the outside world, allowing me to avoid the headache of DDoS shielding while also not using Cloudflare.

Interesting data from 2023

The most popular posts

I hold the first three spots for the most popular posts on the instance, followed by a CloudFloof edit by Houl.

Blobfox vs Blobcat popularity

The blobcats reign supreme by a pretty insane margin. The dip in blobcats is because misskey.io had broken federation for multiple days in December.

But what about the ratio between blobs? Blobcats are again doing strong and have a large majority, but blobfoxes also make up 11%. Both neofoxes and neocats combined also reach around 11% of usage.

A total of 23% of all emojis PlasmaTrap has seen are some variant of blob. Blobs are funny. :3

Top federation activity

^{Note: percentages are of the 40% of federation activity large enough to not get aggregated into “Other”, which makes up over 60%.}

PlasmaTrap mostly federates with smaller instances, the gigantic mastodon.social only makes up ~15% of activity. It's excluded here so as not to clutter the pie chart. Tech.lgbt and Absturztau.be make up a major part of federation with PlasmaTrap, despite not being nearly as large as the major Mastodon instances. Yay, decentralization! :)

The technical side

PlasmaTrap currently runs on a physical server next to my desk. I run a two-node Proxmox Server-Cluster, in which PlasmaTrap is an LXC with everything it needs inside. The two servers are connected with a 2.5G interconnect, with 400 Mbit/s connection to the internet.

Backups are made to the other node every two hours, with one a week getting uploaded to a backup server in the Cloud in the unlikely event that both servers die at once or I get my Hypervisor hacked somehow. Or maybe my house burns down.

The database of PlasmaTrap has reached 44GB. This sounds large, but it's actually less than it was before the Sharkey migration happened. It now stores 30 million posts and metadata about over 800.000 users.

While we're on the topic:

The Sharkey migration

PlasmaTrap used to be a Firefish instance. It even used to be a Calckey instance; it was amongst the first to switch from Misskey to Calckey. Back then, it only required changing the running server, with the database still being compatible.

Calckey was a good experience, mostly. It was janky at times, but it added many features that I felt needed to be added to Misskey then, like edits and a prettier UI.

With the rebrand to Firefish happening, I felt like the project was losing steam. Bugs were going unfixed for weeks; stuff that was poorly or not tested made it into releases, causing issues. A frankly just bad solution for firefish.social being unusably slow became the focus, only for it not to work out.

The direction Firefish was going felt very poor. I already considered switching to something else back then, wanting to avoid needing to debug my live instance because something unpredictably broke in production. The problem was that no real alternative other than base Misskey existed, which lacked the Firefish feature set.

And then Sharkey came along, providing what I wanted. It's a soft-fork, based on the actively worked on Misskey upstream codebase, which provides a much stronger foundation than a hardfork with a few developers could hope to provide. They have edits, they have a Firefish-style UI and a lot of the little convenience features that I used Firefish for in the first place.

Migration was relatively simple, though it required around two hours of downtime. Some data in the database had to be moved around to a format Misskey expected, and then it was a matter of running all the database migration scripts all the way back from Misskey v12 (when Calckey was created) to the current day.

After messing around with the configuration to resolve any weirdness caused by the migration, PlasmaTrap was up and running again. It was now twice as fast and more stable under the hood.

Gone were the days of thousands of logged errors a day. Misskey v13 being made for the enormous misskey.io instance very much shows, it's stupidly fast and actually does good caching. I sometimes miss some Firefish features, but I'd never go back. Not everyone was happy with this, and that's understandable, but at this rate, I'd not expect Firefish to ever become as stable as Sharkey is right now.

In conclusion

It's been a successful year overall. No real significant issues happened; downtime was infrequent after I got everything figured out correctly.

Hoping I can say the same in the next year's post, seeya! :)

if you want to , I'd really appreciate it :3