'Allo m@tes, for some inexplicable reason we're all still here after yet another year in this fucked up world, so I thought it would be a good time to recap what we've done as it's been a fairly busy year for our growth and maturity.

2024 Notable Events

2024 Canvas

Soon after our new year celebration, the 2024 canvas happened and we had fun. I blogged a bit about that event here.

Apropos the 2025 Canvas is almost upon us, so start making some plans!

Mlmym retired and Tesseract (re-)added

We had to retire our mlmym (i.e. old.reddit) interface as it was abandoned and was running into issues. Interestingly, the lemmy.world crowd seems to have started maintaining it somewhat on their own, so maybe we'll re-add it in the future.

At the same time we've redeployed Tesseract and it's quickly become on my favourite frontends.

Radical Instance Democracy

Threativore, the core admin tool I've developed to support our instance has grown with leaps and bounds. Through it. we implemented some radical and unique approaches to our instance governance as well as some cool features like user flair, vouching, flagging systems, welcome messages and more.

We've already used the voting system to create mandates on how to handle our instance and it certainly helps the crew know that the direction we sail is a welcomed one. Some examples:

• Banning Xitter links - Passed
• Sanctioning off-topic comments - Passed
• Reversing an instance ban - Failed

So many new subscribers!

This years we're had multiple large join waves

We're nowhere close to the lemmy.world of course, but last I checked, we're the 5th largest based on Monthly Active Users, and soon to be 4th after lemm.ee shuts down, which I think is impressive for the instance with the a difficult domain to remember, a 2 page application form, and and some spicy takes on politics. 😅

Benevolent Poison

We recently added more countermeasures for the asocial corporate bots swarming the internet, by onboarding Iocaine among other countermeasures. Fun news. The GPTBot is the most greedy, delving 300-page deep in garbage.

Accessibility and Translations

We added the rblind themes instance-wide before it was cool , and now of course everyone who upgrades to 0.19.12 also has them.

At the same time, we added Korean, Greek and Spanish translations to our application form and golden rules which you can see and improve in our wiki.

Staff

We've added 2 new moderators @[email protected] and @[email protected] and one new sysadmin @[email protected] to our instance who have already proved their weight in doubloons! Things are scaling up nicely!

Matrix

Our real-time matrix channels have been growing busier in later months and it's great to see all you weirdos interact! For the rest of you, what are you waiting for?

Membership

I know you've all been waiting for it, so here's another breakdown of our membership alignments as of this date

Analysis Results:
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Historical Pirate: 757 (7.9%)
Digital Pirate: 2095 (21.9%)
Pirate Tools: 1212 (12.7%)
Fictional Character: 831 (8.7%)
FOSS advocate: 2415 (25.2%)
Free Software: 1286 (13.4%)
Anarchist: 1304 (13.6%)
ASD: 227 (2.4%)
ADHD: 509 (5.3%)
Other: 342 (3.6%)
Unparseable: 0 (0.0%)

Total Answers Analyzed: 9572
Answers matching multiple categories: 1744

Top Mentions per Category:
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Historical Pirate: Blackbeard (347), Anne Bonny (55), Zheng Yi Sao (50)
Digital Pirate: Fitgirl (344), Aaron Swartz (291), The Pirate Bay (162)
Pirate Tools: Genp (679), BitTorrent (120), *Arrs (93)
Fictional Character: Captain Jack Sparrow (345), One Piece (120), Dread Pirate Roberts (71)
FOSS advocate: Linus Torvalds (721), Richard Stallman (596), Louis Rossmann (177)
Free Software: Lemmy (420), Linux (211), VLC (73)
Anarchist: Emma Goldman (154), Kropotkin (113), Chomsky (98)
Other: Anonymous (47), Elon Musk (31), O'Reilly (28)

Notable here is GenP shooting up the charts with the migration of their reddit comm, even though we've been explicitly rejecting "GenP" applications for a while, since those lazy bastards just started sharing an application answer to copy-paste even though we asked them not to do that

Funding

M@tes are clearly incredible people which is shown by how well they're taking care of their social third place. Not only have we reach our objective for the first half of 2025, but you've almost completely funded the rest of 2025 itself!

All this ensures there's no stress whatsoever about keeping the lights on. But since we sail in uncharted waters, it's good to have a little bit saved in our treasure hoard in case of...complications, so keep it up!

Ko-fi	Liberapay

Finally, I want to extend my warmest thanks to everyone who make this possible, from the staff who put their time and mental health on the line, to the donators who help sustain this endeavor, to all the commenters and voting lurkers, who keep providing the weird content we all thrive on!

On a personal note, I'm not here to build a social media empire, which is why I'm not starting a ton of dbzer0-branded social media services. I feel that putting all my efforts into one very well run instance will go further and will keep the people satisfied. Myself I'm using lemmy constantly as I'm a big believer in "dogfooding", which is why I keep adding new tweaks and features via tools like the threativore and fediseer. Point is: I don't plan to stop so long as you're all staying around to make lemmy interesting to me, so thanks for being part of the same community. I'm proud to call this my home and all of you my m@tes!