After a furious 2022, SFBA enjoyed a very cozy 2023 with slower user growth and a wonderful sense of community that has grown stronger every month. Not only did our San Francisco Bay Area-focused community work together to create an informative and comfy local place on the Internet, but we also met in person twice during the year. In February we had our first IRL event at Club Fugazi–the first time the SFBA team got to meet our community members in person– and it was a wonderful experience. In August the community enjoyed a hot summer day in one of San Francisco’s parks with BBQ, snacks and some music.

In terms of hard numbers, the SFBA community grew from 36,750 at the beginning of the year to roughly 38,750 at the end of the year. Keep in mind that the SFBA team cleaned out over two thousand spam accounts during the year.

Our Mastodon instance also hit the staggering number of 2 billion sidekiq transactions.  This number means that the SFBA Mastodon instance has exchanged 2 billion events (posts, likes, etc.) with the fediverse since its inception in December 2019.

Technology-wise, in addition to multiple upgrades of the Mastodon software itself, we stabilized the architecture of the instance, which enables us to scale up and down to keep the instance highly available and fast while keeping costs contained.  We’ve also experimented with additional fediverse software, and may be offering more options to our community in 2024.

The SFBA team roster was mostly stable throughout the year. We only replaced one team member–welcome to the team @briskwhisk and thanks a lot for all your work @jeffkibuule !

Our moderation team has consistently worked to make sure they keep a good balance of engagement and disengagement, avoiding burnout by both recusing themselves from specific topics and passing on reports that need a second (or third) opinion. Luckily, we are a large enough team to be able to do this.

Financially we were able to build up a nice cushion of roughly half a year of operating costs, which should give everyone trust in SFBA’s longevity.

We are looking forward to 2024.  Thanks everyone for being AWESOME!

The SFBA Team