Ani.Social's 1st Birthday! 🥳

Today Ani.Social is officially 1 year old! It's kind of crazy that it's been a year already. I still remember the days when it was just me posting illustrations of Kurumi. Now there's nearly 1,000 of us and over 50 communities! We've been through a lot this year (defederations, federation issues, migrations, etc) but I'm happy there's a lot of support from the community and even other admins from different instances! I want to say thank you to everyone who has contributed through posts, comments, community tools, reports, funding, and more!

Ani.Social was kind of an experiment to see if hosting a public instance is something sustainable and fulfilling. After a year I can say that it is both! :D Here's to another year!

(Fun fact: We share the same birthday as Gawr Gura from Hololive EN.)

(Fun fact 2: Ani.Social was supposed to be a KBin instance. But because there was not docker container, I settled with Lemmy instead.)

Upgrade to Lemmy ~~v0.19.4~~ v0.19.5

We upgraded to ~~v0.19.4~~ v0.19.5 which brings some new features like the ability to remove stuff you uploaded through your profile page. A full list of changes may be found here. I also want to note that because sometimes upgrading Lemmy doesn't take very long, I might not make an announcement in advance anymore.

Accidental image removal

A few weeks ago, there were some images that were deleted because of a bug from a tool I used to remove old images cached from other instances. I have a long explanation here. This shouldn't happen again (hopefully!).

Verification mails did not send

For about a week in May, email was not working so some people who signed up did not receive an email. I was informed by a user who sent an email at help@ani.social. This has been resolved and anyone who did not receive a verification email can email me to have your account verified.

Random downtimes

You might notice that there are some downtime here and there. Part of this is because of small changes I make to the server (like enabling or disabling certain settings). These usually don't take long (a minute or two of downtime).

Sometimes you might see the instance gone for as long as an hour or two. This is usually caused by our hosting provider. This type of downtime is not really within my control so please bare with it. If the instance is down/inaccessible you can visit https://status.ani.social where I post updates.

Automatic moderation tools

In the near future, I plan to add automatic moderation tools (automod) such as LemmyAutomod and Fedi-safety. Both tools are likely experimental and may remove posts or images wrongly. I'll keep a close eye on them when I deploy them.

Closing thoughts -- one year in the Fediverse

A few days ago I was reading this article called "Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of FLOSS" which made a lot of interesting points on the Fediverse (duh). Theses 3, 5, and 6 are the most relevant ones in my opinion.

Thesis 3 is relevant for a lot of the political discussions and issues on defederation you see around in the Fediverse. Thesis 5 is relevant for developers, admins, and moderators as it deals with labor. Thesis 6 extends this to users.

Transitioning from corporate social media extends far past from simply "install this app and treat it like Reddit/Twitter/Instagram". It's not just a technical change for most users, it's a new social experience. The social world of the Fediverse is different from corporate social media because of how it operates differently (in policy, labor, etc). More importantly though, a lot of our practices and principles are still experimental so it's interesting to see how these are changing and developing over time (and as mentioned in the article, how these will generate new "userships").

Anyway, I suddenly feel a wave of laziness so maybe I won't write anything more than that. Feel free to read the article because there's a lot to think about.

Again, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! Thanks for reading all the way through!