Alo you 'orrible lot, another year is almost at end end. Can you believe we launched this ship one and a half year ago? And we're still going strong! Our instance keeps growing even with the "stringent" application instructions we have, with a good mix of pirates, anarchists and other weirdos joining. All according to plan!

Communities

Last year the waters have been fairly calm, with our three top communities continuing to get more traffic

• !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com continues to upset libs whenever it brings up electoralism, while getting highly upvoted on everything else
• !adhd@lemmy.dbzer0.com hitting the frontpage with almost every post and getting a regular mix of rule 1 violations and people self-realizing.
• !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com being of course the most popular safe harbor outside of corporate shark infested waters

At the same time, our new communities seem to be finding ample traction

• !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com allowing people to air their grievances and striving to keep mods and admins in check, in lemmy and out.
• !flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com fills in the gaps leftymemes leaves and provides a shiposting spot for anarchists while being unapologetically anti-tankie.
• !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com continuing to bash disinformation wherever it appears.
• !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com uniting and organizing all the image sharing comms together

Do mention your favourite new comms in the comments

Moderation

Generally y'all seem to be playing nice enough. We haven't had to issue that many bans instance-wide except for some dedicated trolls. The application instructions seem to be working quite well at stopping automated spammers and stupid bigots from getting in, in the first place.

Likewise there's been very few, if any appeals in our matrix channels and 0 !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com callouts.

Moderation load is manageable but do let us know if you think there's areas of improvement.

Fundraising

As always, our instance is completely donation based. We don't want to sell anything or advertise anyone. The plan is to avoid giving any incentives to enshittify this instance, or otherwise to give any ammo for anyone to claim trying to spread disinfo. The goal is to provide a truly communal space for people to express themselves (mostly how much they hate copyrights and capitalism 😅).

Our ko-fi page has managed to almost completely cover the server costs until the end of the year and anything extra will go as buffer for the next year. I'm also working on creating something official to enhance this whole process and hopefully I will announce it soon.

Given our costs and our monthly active users, each euro being donated, is currently supporting ~10 other active users in this instance, so do consider everything you donate as mutual aid to those needing a digital home!

(If you have any ideas on how I can reward sponsors to this instance, do let us know. I already offered custom emojis, but people don't seem to be interested)

Users

Just for fun, I decided to see what kind of answers people have given for our application. The tool to compile this took me way longer than I would have liked and I still have around 1500 answers that need improved parsing, but I'm out of time so here's what people answered for their favourite character

Historical Pirate: 447 (9.5%)
Digital Pirate: 1021 (21.7%)
Fictional Character: 479 (10.2%)
FOSS advocate: 1338 (28.4%)
Free Software: 400 (8.5%)
Anarchist: 480 (10.2%)
Other: 46 (1.0%)

Total Answers Analyzed: 4712
Answers matching multiple categories: 632

Top Mentions per Category:
---------------------------
Historical Pirate: Blackbeard (248), Anne Bonny (40), Zheng Yi Sao (25)
Digital Pirate: Fitgirl (183), Aaron Swartz (173), Empress (96)
Fictional Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (215), Luffy (73), Dread Pirate Roberts (43)
FOSS advocate: Linus Torvalds (888), Richard Stallman (332), Luis Rossman (97)
Free Software: Lemmy (304), Gnu (30), Github (23)
Anarchist: Kropotkin (86), Emma Goldman (78), Chomsky (53)
Other: John Oliver (15), Tim O'Reilly (15), Bernie Sanders (6)

Epilogue

I'm very proud of how well this instance, and the threadiverse in general (lemmy + mbin + piefed) is going. This feels like a fairly active forum from the good ole days, which cannot easily be taken away from us by shitty admins and corpos. Here's to one more year!