Hey Spectrons,

We've got a few updates for you this month, regarding our project and infrastructure.

Spectra was started as an attempt to build a solid creator community on the Fediverse. It's been an amazing journey, and our server community has grown nearly 500% since March 2023. Check it out!

March 2023

While this has been phenomenal, there's something we need to come clean about: our little server was struggling badly. The amount of people attempting to upload Gigabytes and Gigabytes of their old YouTube channels proved to be an incredible strain, and put us in a tricky situation.

We've been having a few issues with the server recently, mainly with the database process stopping! 😱 This has led to some uncomfortable situations where PeerTube goes down. After some investigative work, we found that the server got gunked up with incomplete jobs, and the local disk filled up with gigabytes upon gigabytes of video. 🤮

This isn't a good situation for anybody. We're sorry to say that a big number of import jobs never got around to finishing, and a number of videos may have gotten stuck in the transcoding phase. We tried our best to recover and complete the jobs we could...but, many of you might notice that your Video Import lists are currently empty. 😞 We're sorry. 🥺 We had to do this to keep the server going.

A bit of good news: thanks to our 19 generous patrons on LiberaPay, our server infrastructure has been successfully upgraded! We have twice as much RAM and processing power as we did before, and a decent buffer for space as well. Check out our specs!

Before:

In addition to the improved infrastructure, we've also upgraded to the new PeerTube 6.0 release, which brings a lot of welcome performance and design improvements for you to enjoy!  
We'll keep an eye on Spectra for the next few days to make sure that the storage doesn't spill over again, but so far, the server seems to be healthy!

One thing that's been a little bit awkward is that the person running Spectra is not super engaged with anybody on the server. It's not all bad, I don't mind just quietly running a server and letting people enjoy themselves. However, we've needed a way to get updates out to people without tripping over ourselves across networks.

LiberaPay has been really good to us, and we'll continue using it for legacy donations for the time being. However, we are embracing OpenCollective as an experiment, in the hopes that we can have one concentrated place to share updates, reflect expenses, highlight our patrons, and promote some of the videos within our community! It's a fledgling effort for now, but we hope to create a space that will actually help our community growth and keep everybody on the same page.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I'll give your time back to you. Thank you everyone for your generosity and support, and please follow along as we move forward!