I am intending to start posting my experiences and findings in first stabilizing, then scaling Infosec.exchange, along with where I see it going in the near/medium term.

I have quite a lot left to sort through and clean up. I should be at the point of circling back to the many (MANY!) people who kindly offered assistance.

Between work and home life and stamping out fires, I haven’t been able to spend the time yet to engage with those volunteers like I wanted. I did, however, manage to appoint an absolutely stellar moderation team. We have been going through a steep learning curve and appreciate your patience and grace as we get our legs under us. I expect we will need to expand that team, particularly to cover different times of day and languages other than English.

Also, I am overwhelmed by the generosity of the community. Three weeks ago, this website had 180 active users. As of this morning, there are 17,053. Very fortunately, I far overspec’d the server, but that was quickly overwhelmed as the site went through cuts cosmic inflationary period. I took some pretty aggressive but expensive steps to get things back to stable, and from a member perspective, that wasn’t the first experience I wanted people to have of mastodon or the fediverse. My intention, after I am able to sleep for a week, is to, with the help of some smart people I’ll be tapping, to consolidate and optimize (cost, performance, and scalability) the environment. In the mean time, Hetzner stock (if there is such a thing) might be a good investment.

It’s been quite interesting to watch the dynamics of the community. While we’ve grown nearly 100 fold in 2 weeks, I have been contacted by people letting me know they’re leaving because $X person is now on the instance, or that the timeline is too busy, or that there are too many 🐈 pics, and so on. For them, the small homey feel of the site was lost. I’ve been thinking about spinning up some parallel instances on the same infrastructure with moderated signups and possibly max numbers of active accounts.

The reason I started the DefSec podcast, I care about the security community deeply and that is why I set up this instance. I am not a celebrity or thought leader or a terribly important person in the scheme of things, and I am not doing this for fame, money, etc. I am fortunate enough to have a well paying job. I am doing this because I want us to be successful against the baddies. At the same time, members of the security community face many challenges like burn out, isolation, and it can be hard to find people who can relate to what we’re going through. My hope is that this place is helpful in some small way.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the community: my intention after I assess whether this is a flash in the pan, is to set up a non-profit foundation to oversee this instance. Assuming we don’t collapse back to 180 active accounts, I want this place to survive me. I want it to be trustworthy and transparent and reliable.

It’s been a busy two weeks. Thank you all for your patience and support. You are the best and I believe in you ​

What happens when you have your own Mastodon instance (just for you) where over 21,000 people follow you and when you’re following over 4,300 people?

You end up paying ~€50/month for Mastodon hosting 👀

It also opens up interesting questions: what happens when a popular account joins your instance (hint: it will probably cost the instance maintainers quite a bit… I don’t envy the mastodon.nu folks right now).

#fediverse #mastodon