FediverseDotGames

We wanted to share an update with you all about the use of private and unlisted videos on our platform.

We're coming up on six months since we first launched the instance. It's been far more successful popular than I could ever imagine. We have (as of the time of writing) 94 members and 181 videos utilising over 500GB of our on-premises data storage.

The spirit of this platform is to provide open, inclusive space to share video content, whether that be video, tech, personal stuff and anything and everything in between.

Unfortunately, we have seen a number of accounts being created for seemingly the sole purpose of hosting private videos for business purposes. This is not in the spirit of this platform, and we will be amending our terms of service around the fair use of private and unlisted videos.

I want to clarify that it is not the purpose of this policy to restrict the use of private and unlisted videos for channels that legitimately exist within and interact with the community at large. It is to prevent the use of our precious, finite resources on accounts that make no contribution to the community at all.

What Can You Do Under the Fair Use Policy?

Under the policy, you will be able to do the following:

• Share small pieces of private content to a very small audience. Bear in mind that the moderation team has full access to all videos on the platform, including private and unlisted videos.
• Provide “early access” to public videos for your paid subscribers on another platform (provided they become public a later date).
• Where the majority of your content is public, provide limited private or unlisted content for any other reason.

What Can't You Do Under the Fair Use Policy?

Under the policy, you will not be able to do the following:

• Upload large volumes of private and/or unlisted videos without any public content on a channel, or where public content makes up a small minority of your overall content volumes.
• Upload any private and/or unlisted content that is contravention of any of our terms.

In Summary

As I've said above, I don't intend to unreasonably restrict anyone's usage on this platform – it is simply about making sure the finest resources we have at our disposal are used to provide content that everyone can enjoy and access.

If you're an account that is at risk of falling foul of this policy we will contact you directly. If not, there's no need to worry.

There is any opportunity that expanded access may be able to be made available to regular financial supporters of our services, as the financial contributions allow us to expand our processing and storage capabilities. If you're interested in this please reach out, but what this would look like hasn't been fully considered as of the writing of this.

It's hard to believe that it's already six months into 2025. There's a whole lot of nastiness going on in the world, and I honestly don't see it getting any better in the short term.

And honestly, that was one of the reasons I started Fediverse.Games. I wanted to create a fun, safe space for people to come together and talk about games, or just life, in.

I'm still learning the best way to be inclusive, or an ally. I'm a middle-class, cis white male, and grew up a pretty sheltered life in a traditionally blue-collar city. But I've always been of the opinion that people should always be allowed to be their authentic self without being harmed by others.

And I hope Fediverse.Games makes the world just that little bit better for those who choose to join us.

2025 Strategy Progress Report

Back in January, I put together a 2025 strategy to help shape how we continued to grow and mature our services through the year. Overall, things are tracking well against these goals.

PeerTube

PeerTube launched in April. We've had a few hiccoughs around the functionality, especially when we switched our edge gateway configuration, which broke uploads. We're also still working to introduce livestream functionality. But overall, I've been surprised at the level of uptake for this service.

We have 44 users at the time of writing this post, with seven who've made uploads to the site. I wasn't expecting to have anywhere near this many, and it's made me seriously reconsider our priorities in terms of increasing available storage. We're nowhere near hitting the storage we have available at the moment, but for the purpose of ensuring sustainable growth, we definitely need to increase what we have available.

Writefreely

Writefreely (where this is being posted!) wasn't on the list of things to work on this year. But regardless, here we are.

It's just me on the instance right now – but our registrations are open and we've love to have you, should you want some fediverse-enabled long form blogging goodness!

Reliability & Resilience

We've worked hard on increasing our availability and reducing the frequency of outages. Our efforts have largely paid off, with all of our services with uptime greater than 99.5% (and a few at three 9s). We've also implemented automated alerting so we get early notice when things go wrong.

As part of our efforts on this, we also replaced our original pair of edge gateways running haproxy with a single gateway running nginx. nginx has proven to be significantly more reliable than haproxy, and brings additional capabilities we can implement in the future as well.

Financial Security & Sustainability

We also implemented two different donation platforms to give those wishing to donate multiple options to do so – so you can now donate to us with Liberapay and Ko-fi.

We don't have any donors at present – and that's okay. We're able to cover all of our expenses with no issues. But donations will allow us to grow sustainably and offer more services.

In Summary

It's been a wild ride over the last six months. I hope you'll continue with us on our journey!

Just a really quick blog post to let everyone know that we're currently working on our next service – WriteFreely!

WriteFreely is a simple, long form blogging service that integrates with the rest of the Fediverse via ActivityPub! It's written in Go (which I love!) and is still in fairly early development.

A note on the sign up process – WriteFreely only allows the use of MailGun at the moment for transactional emails, which doesn't work with our set up (I had a few issues with their customer service team in the past and ended up moving to a different service). What that means is that automated password resets will not be possible at the moment – so make sure you keep your password safe!

I (Bob) will be using this instance for any long form personal writing I'm wanting to do, as well as for long form official communications from the Fediverse.Games team about any of our services.

There's still some tweaking to be done on this instance to fully optimise and get it ready for true production usage, but we'll be working on that over the coming weeks.

Let's put our hands together for WriteFreely and welcome it to the Fediverse.Games family!

Bob