One year old
One year ago, datasci.social was created! 🥳🎂 In this time datasci.social has become a vibrant online community with 286 people who have joined from all over the world, from various disciplines or from industry, providing an online home for the data science community, broadly defined. Explore our awesome stream here: https://datasci.social/public/local
There has been smooth, mostly constant growth over the past year, and luckily we have been facing no moderative or technical challenges. Although we have a fantasic team of 6 voluntary admins/moderators, they didn’t have much to do: All that happened in a year was one week of interference from a few spam accounts spawning on other servers, which required in total 5 moderative actions. Our total downtime in this year was 488 minutes, which means an uptime of above 99.9%!
In the past months, we have also received more and more generous financial support from the community (Thank you!💕), which now covers half of our running costs. This enables running our space without ads or other interferences known from for-profit platforms, and has brought us on a realistic path towards sustainable long-term operation. Also, one year ago Mastodon hosting providers were overwhelmed due to a frenzy of new servers being created, but now the dust has settled and we might look into more affordable hosting options that might have become available over time.
Our server has not reached any capacity limits yet, and also the community is doing very well, so we continue to stay open. For now we also keep registration at datasci.social to require manual approval so our server cannot get swamped with too many new, potentially malicious, registrations overnight. So far we have processed all new registration requests well within 12 hours, a time we keep striving for.
Although Mastodon is not the perfect online social network yet, it is better than other platforms we know, not least because of its extraordinary engagement and civility which makes it great for scientists. All in all, datasci.social has turned out a fantastic project and experience, much smoother than anticipated, which we aim to keep nurturing for many more years! 🌱
If you like datasci.social, and if you have the means, please consider donating - every euro goes into server hosting: https://community.datasci.social/docs/support/