Woof.Group 2023 Annual Report

2023 was a big year for Woof.group. We migrated from Masto.host to our own VMs hosted in a US datacenter, became an officially incorporated LLC with a formal Terms of Service, and made new policy with moderator and community input. After dramatic growth in 2022, Woof.group has become a stable community both socially and technically. We're excited for 2024.

Social

After spiking to ~1300 active users in fall 2022 and declining thereafter, our monthly active users (MAUs) rose and fell moderately in 2023. We started with ~800 MAUs, peaked at ~1050 in August, and fell to ~870 by the end of the year. Active users tend to fluctuate significantly: waves of excitement lead to migration from other platforms, but most accounts post nothing and eventually fall dormant. A smaller fraction find a sustainable home on Woof.group, and become active members of the community.

Active users over time

We take on roughly 10-20 new users per week, with some bursts to ~100/week. Woof.group still approves all registrations by hand: pretty much anyone who talks about an interest in leather or kink, no matter how experienced, is approved. We changed the wording on our signup form to be more direct, and found significantly more people writing meaningful applications. However, we still reject a significant number of applications which seem spammy or off-topic: “gay”, “leaving twitter”, “sgkljdfg”, “best essay writing services”, etc. We also, very rarely, reject applications which seem likely to violate Woof.group's policies—primarily pic collector accounts and PnP enthusiasts.

Weekly signups over time

We believe the core community on Woof.group is essentially stable. Weekly logins remain remarkably consistent at ~700/week. Our metrics for current-week logins fell abruptly due to a technical issue in November.

Logins over time

Woof.group members write 500—1000 posts per day, and generate roughly 2,000—6,000 interactions (e.g. boosts, favorites) per day. We saw spikes with an influx of new users in July.

Daily Posts timeseries

Daily interactions timeseries

Our moderators handle roughly one report per day, with occasional spikes to 5-10 per day. This plot goes negative when a user deletes their account—their reports are deleted with them.

Daily Reports Timeseries

We resolve most reports within an hour, and many within ten minutes. Some reports, especially those that require moderator discussion or investigation, take multiple days to resolve; in rare cases, over a week. These figures are cumulative for all of Woof.group's history.

Report resolution times

We introduced an official Terms of Service in 2023. We also made a number of minor policy changes, including banning “PnP” content. We also opted to defer federating with Threads, and continue federating with Twitter bridges.

We developed a formal process in coordination with legal counsel for handling CSAM: we had a few reports of CSAM content, all on other instances, in 2023. This was a part of our only major defederation this year, from h5q.net.

With the collapse of several Fediverse instances this year (notably mastodon.lol, pettingzoo.co, and bear.community) Woof.group has developed an informal policy of opening registration to members of other queer & kinky instances who need a new home, even if they might not consider themselves leather. We're happy to have these members as a part of our community, and so far everyone seems to have gotten along well. We plan to continue this habit in 2024.

All in all, our core approach to culture and community moderation remains essentially unchanged. Users consistently report Woof.group is a pleasant community to be a part of, and we are delighted to continue this work in 2024.

Financial

In the first half of 2023 the instance was, as in previous years, supported entirely by Woof.group's administrator, Kyle “Aphyr” Kingsbury. In 2024 Woof.group incorporated as an LLC and started business bank accounts, funded by an initial capital contribution of $10,000 from Kingsbury. Since then Woof.group has derived all income from donations, and pays its own bills.

Woof.group has one owner (Kingsbury), and no employees. Kingsbury continues to provide administrative, technical, and moderation services for the instance. Our team of moderators (Buster, Bootblackcub, and Mark) continue to volunteer their time. In 2023 neither administrators nor moderators were financially compensated for their work.

Given Woof.group's small income, the instance runs on a shoestring budget. We keep our costs extremely low through volunteer work, forgoing standard business amenities, using free software, and negotiating reduced rates for professional services. Our thanks in particular for the kindness of Woof.group's legal team, who assisted in incorporation, developing our Terms of Service, and policy development.

Our 2023 Profit and Loss includes $1372.53 in revenue (all donations). We incurred $1,796.04 in expenses since August: $1,030.00 in legal fees, $490.07 in web hosting (VMs & object storage), and $275.97 in other dues and subscriptions: email, mail, telephony, registered agent services, etc. Several business costs are annual and were paid before the LLC took over its own expenses; expect a significant increase in expenses in 2024.

Cash Flow Timeseries

On our December 31, 2023 balance sheet Woof.group's net financial assets stood at $9,576.49, with zero liabilities. Owner's equity remains at $10,000, with retained losses of $423.51.

Net Worth Timeseries

As an LLC, Woof.group is legally required to make at least a small profit within a few years. Woof.group aims to become a financially stable instance with a small positive cash flow in 2024. Barring unexpected large expenses—e.g. an unforeseen need for legal consultation—we believe this is possible. You can help by donating to Woof.group.

Technical

Service was generally stable, with brief interruptions for upgrades and maintenance. We tracked every security release of Mastodon. CPU, bandwidth, and memory needs were generally stable.

Network over time

Memory over time

Local disk use rose steadily from 32 to 112 GB this year. Our main disk consumers are the main database (which rose from ~8 to ~30 GB), local backups, and metrics. We have plenty of disk capacity for the next year.

Disk use over time

Postgres disk use over time

Our media storage (photos, audio, video, avatars, etc.) rose gradually from ~180 to ~220 GB. This reflects media our members have posted, as well as our caches of media from other instances. With the upgrade to Mastodon 4.2.0 our cache-clearing cron job broke, causing significant increases in media store use.

Media storage over time

The Mastodon 4.2.1 release appears to have introduced a memory leak in Redis which resulted in a slow rise in memory use over several months. Despite raising Redis' memory limits, we experienced some service degradation when memory ran low in late November. The 4.2.3 release appears (tentatively) to have resolved this issue.

Redis memory use

Worker queue latencies were generally in the 0-10 second range for most of 2023. However, we've seen increased push latencies in Q3 and Q4, and adding a second push worker process does not seem to have resolved the issue. This may require further investigation.

Sidekiq latencies over time

Our infrastructure needs are likely to rise slightly in 2024 as we accumulate more posts and media, but our current hardware should suffice for the next year or so. The largest unresolved technical challenge is the failure of our media cache-cleaning job.

Thanks

Woof.group would not be possible without you, our members. Thank you for being kind to one another, for your thoughtful, exciting, and hilarious posts, and for your donations. Our profound gratitude as well to our volunteer moderators, who take time out of their lives to mitigate spam, handle complaints about content warnings, and make tough calls on sensitive questions. We appreciate you all.

Here's to a great 2024.
https://blog.woof.group/announcements/woof-group-2023-annual-report
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