RIP botsin.space

29 October 2024

There's no easy way to put it, so here goes -- after a lot of consideration, I've made the hard (frankly, painful) decision to shut down botsin.space. TLDR: here's the plan:

Why?

I launched botsin.space in April of 2017, which honestly feels like it was about six thousand years ago. Originally I just wanted to play around with the fediverse and Mastodon. The oauth flow for creating a bot was messy, so I forked Mastodon and fixed it, deployed those changes to botsin.space, and invited people to create bots.

The server was popular with bot allies and artists, people who wanted to get RSS feeds onto the fediverse, as well as students and professors who wanted to work on coding projects or learn about federated social media. There have been some moderation challenges over the years, but to be honest those have never been all that considerable.

But botsin.space has always been a bit of an odd duck with a unique set of challenges. Over the years, the server has grown to have around a few thousand active accounts, which isn't all that many. However, they've generated something like 32 million statuses. Just to put that in perspective, mastodon.social has over 2 million users, who have generated around 110 million statuses. So the usage patterns are very different, and I think it's safe to say the the mastodon codebase is tuned for mastodon.social and not a weird freaky server like botsin.space.

I work on the internet professionally, use Rails at my day job, and server management is part of my job description, so I've been able to use my skills to keep botsin.space running on a relative shoestring budget. Until recently, the whole thing ran on one server. But that's not maintainable, and given that and some other concerns, I think that now is the time to retire the server.

There are four major expenses for botsin.space, in order from least to most expensive:

  1. My time. As long as I find managing the server rewarding, this is an expense I'm happy to pay.
  2. Server costs. I've been able to be fairly cheap here until recently.
  3. Database storage. The database for the server lives on a dedicated volume at Digital Ocean, and is currently around 191GB in size. Every time I need to increase the size of this volume, the expense goes up, and it's safe to assume that this will only continue to grow.
  4. File storage and bandwidth. These expenses will also only get more expensive over time. File bandwidth is the #1 charge on the monthly server bill right now. I live in fear of an AI scraper figuring out how to scrape all of these files and bankrupting me overnight.

Until recently, my thinking has been: "I'm cool with finding all sorts of weird tricks to keep the server going, and I'll worry about #3 and #4 someday in the future maybe lalalalala I can't hear you." But the recent Mastodon upgrade has caused a significant amount of performance degradation, and I think the only way to really solve it is going to be to throw a lot of money into hardware.

I should mention at this point that I've had a Patreon to help with server expenses, and I've also accepted Paypal donations, and I'm truly grateful for everyone who has ever sent me money to support the server.

However, even with the support, expenses have always outpaced the donations, and while that's been fine with me for a long time, it's not sustainable. I'm fortunate enough to have a career and life where I've been able to support botsin.space, but I can't do it forever, and as the expenses and challenges mount, I find myself thinking about things that I'd probably rather be doing with my time.

With a few exceptions, botsin.space isn't anyone's primary instance, and I've always been mindful of the fact that everyone who supports botsin.space financially has other places and people to think of also, and I am so thankful for the consideration. I hope that everyone who is currently supporting botsin.space finds another instance to support, there are a lot of great instances out there with vibrant communities that need all the help they can get to survive.

So, given two choices -- asking for more donations so I can pay for more hardware to keep the instance running, or retiring it and encouraging people to support more community-oriented instances, I'll choose the second option every time.

As I mentioned above, I'll be working to keep the server stable and running for as long as possible, to give people a chance to migrate their accounts, get archives, etc. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me at @colin@muffin.industries. It's probably smarter to ping me there instead of at botsin.space, because it's more likely that your message will be delivered in a timely fashion.

I'd like to thank everyone who has ever run a bot on botsin.space and gotten joy out of it. I'd like to thank all the people who have ever shared their thanks or kind words with me online -- your support has meant the world to me. I'd like to thank all the #botALLY folks, who have been a constant source of inspiration and learning to me for over a decade. Finally, I'd like to thank Johanna, who has always been there for me <3