AkademieNL update

In February 2024, I announced I took over as the administrator of the Mastodon server AkademieNL.social. It has been a pretty smooth ride since – there are a few signups, but not too many. Spam posts are what gets reported most often. It does not take up too much of my time – an hour every week or so. The monthly active users on the server sits around ~120 people.

As an admin, the main and most regular thing I notice are the costs. The previous admin shared their costs, amounting to $783.85 or $65.32/month on average. Since I am admin, total costs have almost doubled $1,459.74; monthly costs have risen by 150% – $91.23/month on average. I also notice the costs because the time between server upgrades is shortening – this means that the costs are increasing faster. It went from an average of 210.5 days between upgrades, to 119 days on average.

In order to be transparent about the costs and ground myself, I looked at all the historical financial contributions. Community contributions under the previous admin amounted to $799.58, covering the costs. Under my tenure, it felt like costs were quickly outpacing the contributions. Upon reconciling all the payments, $1,466.35 in financial contributions means my feeling was wrong – community contributions covered the running costs of the Mastodon server. A special thanks goes to the major contribution made by SURF – otherwise we would've had only ~$500 in contributions.

So at this point the server is breaking even. As soon as the next bill comes in, it will no longer be. Stable, recurring contributions are at $8.66 right now after payment processing fees. It means there's a gap of $109.65, which I will have to pay out of pocket starting next month.

I got the feedback that people prefer not to contribute through PayPal, and I see you can now also use credit cards on Ko-Fi, so no PayPal required anymore. Remember – it's more helpful to contribute a little every month, rather than a lot once. As I mentioned when I became an admin, I am committed to covering the difference, yet the more community contributions there are, the easier it is to maintain the server beyond March 2026.