2024 In Review

As 2024 comes to a close it feels only fitting to look back across the last 12 months, we achieved a lot and have been able to continue to sustain a number of projects and services while slowly growing and enhancing our overall offering and services. This post will look to reflect on some of the key call-outs for 2024 as well as talking a little bit about some of our plans for the year ahead.

In Q4 of 2024 ATLAS were awarded a contract to deliver technical architecture and consulting services to one of our customers, the first of it's kind for us as an organisation. The award of this contract has resulted in quite a few changes, the vast majority sit entirely behind the scenes but some may (or will in the future) be noticed, one major change is that Ryan (me!) now works for ATLAS full time rather than ATLAS and it's projects being a side role for evenings and weekends and my time is fully allocated to delivering this contract and securing future work for myself and the company. A lot of my time towards the end of 2024 has been spent working on getting everything we need in place set-up and operational to support the delivery of this contract and leaning on the support of some of our external teams and companies which we contract services from to ensure a lot of our business tooling and capabilities exist and work, like Payroll for example which up until now was not required as nobody took a salary from ATLAS before this contract was awarded.

As part of the contract award ATLAS has also become VAT Registered meaning we now have a requirement to charge VAT across the products and services that we offer, as there is some complexity with exactly how this works especially for the contributions received to support the Mastodon instances we run I'll talk about this more in the respective sections of this blog. I've also been busy making a few other changes primarily under the hood as it were which aren't likely to impact anybody directly, the main change being our change of registered business address which should be updated everywhere it needs to be and we've had some changes to some of our internal software and systems to facilitate the contract award and future work we do.

2024 for our two Mastodon sites was primarily around maintaining the sites and keeping things ticking over, we saw a general decline in active users across both of the sites, we don't currently have data to suggest how many folks moved to other instances across the federated network compared to how many have fully left. One key highlight for the projects was our update e-mail for all Universeodon members to provide updates and insights into the project as well as a gentle reminder for those individuals who may have signed up during the November 2022 twitter migration and have since not logged in or otherwise forgot they had accounts, with this we did see a small increase in members of the community returning which was a real positive for us.

Our main focus for 2024 was to re-work a lot of our underlying infrastructure and where it made sense, consolidate the volume of servers and capacity we were operating at, there were two main drivers behind this work, the first being our server footprint was significant due to our response to the massive quantity of traffic and members trying to register on our site from November of 2022 and a couple of smaller spikes since then, that resulted in us hugely over-provisioning our server capacity to meet demand. The other driver for this work was the fact our underlying operating system for our infrastructure had reached end of life and required a full re-install to bring it up to the latest versions. As we were in the process of re-building all of our infrastructure we also identified that our database servers were once again starting to reach their storage capacity and we knew from previous experiments earlier in 2024 moving to network attached storage for our databases did not work well or in a performant way, this pushed us to order an additional server with much larger storage volumes to exclusively (for now) run our database servers for both of our Mastodon instances. As of December 2024 we have nearly completed this work with only a single server left to retire which currently runs very little, however has so far had some complexities for us to retire without disrupting anything else, we expect this server to be retired before the end of January 2025.

Looking ahead into 2025 we have a few areas of work we will be looking to prioritise for our Mastodon projects, the first will be to bring the instances up to date with the latest version of Mastodon as we are currently running a few minor versions behind, where we run a slightly custom fork of Mastodon we haven't yet had the time to ensure these patches can be re-applied to the latest version of Mastodon, our first priority will be to bring us up to date with the latest patch version on the 4.2 releases before upgrading to the newer 4.3 release branch. To minimise the future risk of issues we are going to be building a development / pre-release / testing instance of Mastodon which will allow us to test and verify that upgrades don't break anything in our setup before we push it out to everyone, this will allow us not just to update our Mastodon versions but in the future also allow us to better manage and upgrade some of our other dependencies like the database versions, software versions for Ruby and similar.

We will also be undertaking work to improve the utilisation of our media storage, currently on both Mastodon instances we're seeing very high storage usage, the cost of which is becoming very substantial. We believe some of this may be attributed to media which should have been purged but has not yet been or failed to be purged and some of this will be due to the age and growth of both sites. As we re-evaluate our hardware we will also continue to review if there is a better, more efficient and more cost effective way we can host this data.

We are currently also identifying what we would need to purchase and setup to allow us to migrate our Mastodon instances as well as some other infrastructure to a co-located data centre to replace the current monthly leases we are paying for servers, we hope that over the longer term this would save us money on our ongoing costs for running the sites as well as enable us to better scale and adapt our infrastructure while retaining the ability to fall back to renting dedicated hardware on a monthly basis should we see another spike in registration and members like we did in November of 2022, during 2024 we engaged with a number of providers that would be able to host our servers and believe we have identified a likely provider and we're currently working to finalise the exact hardware that will be required and process these purchases, we expect this to only have a minimal noticeable impact to those using the sites when it comes to the database migration, however all other activities we are currently confident can be performed with 0 downtime, we will of course share updates on this as we have more news, we're currently hoping to purchase this hardware during Q2 of 2025 and have it deployed and migrations starting by Q3 of 2025.

Throughout 2024 our open beta / experimentation with Pixelfed as an addition to our federated software offerings continued and a significant amount of time was put into getting the site back up and running after some issues following the server hardware work mentioned in the Mastodon section which caused some unexpected issues for our Pixelfed instance.

On December 30th 2024 we announced our plans to discontinue the hosting of our Pixelfed instance following a substantial series of abusive comments and poor behaviour from the Pixelfed projects creator and primary contributor over the course of the 3 days preceding which ultimately does not align with our organisations values or the values of the communities which we have built to date. We have not yet set a date for the retirement of the site and I am currently investigating alternative pieces of software that we may be able to deploy in-place of Pixelfed which would both provide the current user community a migration path while ceasing our support of the Pixelfed project.

Due to the abusive behaviours of the Pixelfed creator and lead maintainer, we also no longer have any plans or intent to host instances of Loops, Sup or any other software developed by the individual in question as doing so we feel would be inappropriate and signalling our support for the abusive and inappropriate behaviours this individual has demonstrated multiple times in recent history, should in the future there be hard forks of this software maintained entirely by a different party with different values, we will of course re-consider our position on hosting such software.

We are continuing to investigate and identify other ActivityPub related software that we may wish to host as open instances for public sign-ups, PeerTube continues to be one we are seriously considering hosting in the not too distant future and depending on the capacity in our new compute clusters when we migrate our Mastodon instances (See above for more info) this may become a lot more practical.

We had been planning to host a loops instance when the server software became open source however as mentioned in the Pixelfed section of this blog, that will no longer be happening and for more info on why please scroll up to read. I'm keen for suggestions and feedback on what software our existing community would like to see hosted, if you've got recommendations or software you think might be of interest please drop me a message on Mastodon!

Throughout 2024 we performed a refresh of our Virtual Private Server range to refresh both our prices and the exact details on our VPS specifications to better adapt our plans to meet our customers needs following feedback from our customers. During 2024 we also performed a series of improvements to our back-end infrastructure offering with capacity improvements to our French region including the migration of all existing clients onto our newer infrastructure at no additional costs. Throughout 2024 we've also worked to optimise our infrastructure and operations and despite seeing significant (In some areas nearly 200%) price increases we have continued to offer our services at the prices which customers originally signed up to them for even when this results in those services not breaking even for us any longer.

Through 2025 we will be working to migrate to a new billing panel solution, while the current solution has served us well and has been in use since our original launch back in 2013, 12 years on and sadly it's not providing us with a lot of the functionality and improvements we're seeing elsewhere and the pricing has continued to increase, we are hoping to move over to a new billing panel before the end of Q1 2025 and we will of course work to ensure any disruption or downtime to customers is minimal.

We are also currently developing a new product line which we're hoping to launch in a beta launch during Q2 of 2025 with the hopes of it going fully live before the end of this year, we will have some more updates on this when we're ready to share more details.

2024 has been a busy year and one packed full of changes and improvements and we couldn't have done it without our communities on our fedi hosted software, and our customers supporting us through our hosting or professional services offerings. We have a lot we would like to achieve through 2025 and a substantial amount of work to do in order to get there and we can't wait for you to join us on this journey.

I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you, your family, friends and loved ones a very happy new year and good health throughout 2025.