FediverseDotGames

As we come to the end of 2025, I thought it'd be a good idea to revisit our progress over the last twelve months, how we tracked against our goals in our 2025 strategy, and where we'll be looking to take our 2026 strategy.

Overall, I'm reasonably happy with how we've gone through the year. There's been some periods of poor reliability which impacted all of our services to some degree, but it has especially impacted our Peertube instance and users uploading videos to it.

Stability Issues Through the Year

There's been two broad reasons for this, which I'll briefly cover:

• Hardware Reliability: at the start of the year, our services were running on primarily consumer-grade hardware, with a few enterprise-grade additions. We faced a number of issues with the consumer grade hardware, including drive corruptions and power supply failures.

As a result of this we've put considerable effort into getting enterprise-grade hardware into crucial areas, such as our control plane. We're also gradually moving from consumer-grade drives to enterprise-grade drives with full PLP – this makes data safer in a power loss situation and also increases the performance of our Ceph cluster.

• Edge Proxy: since Day 1 we've run a proxy in front of our services – both to shield our origin from malicious traffic and to help with caching static assets not in our object buckets.

We struggled to size and configure it correctly, and over the last 12 months made numerous configuration changes to try to maximise performance while maintaining all core functionality.

At the end of the day, our original setup just wasn't fit for purpose. After a long search and plenty of exploration, we finally found what we were after in BunnyCDN (Affiliate Link). We now run a distributed, containerised edge proxy which has significantly improved response times by getting the majority of our static assets closer to users.

There were challenges getting upload functionality just right, but we're looking pretty good now.

Our 2025 Strategy

At the beginning of the year, I set out a number of goals we'd work toward achieving throughout the year. I intentionally went big with these goals, and didn't have an expectation that they'd be completely fulfilled. Overall though I feel we've performed well.

Reliability and Resilience

We've made big steps throughout the year toward improving the reliability and resilience of our systems, implementing automated monitoring and alerting of downtime. We made further steps in the last couple of months to further granulate the monitoring to sub-components of some of our services – and we'll continue to investigate how to best implement new monitoring on some of our pain point endpoints, such as Peertube uploads.

We've also kicked on with our goals of uplifting the technology across the cluster, which culminated in us replacing our control plane nodes a few months back – doing so has significantly improved control plane operation performance, and we've been able to redeploy the old control plane nodes as low power data plane nodes to assist with less mission-sensitive workloads.

Upgrading our data storage kicks on too – we're continuing to move from consumer- to enterprise-grade SSDs and HDDs, a process we're optimistic will be completed in 2026.

One part of this goal where we achieved less than I'd have hoped was our goal to automate all of our maintenance processes in 2025. We did have some early success with a PoC for an automated maintenance model, but needed to put this on a backburner as we combated hardware and reliability issues through the second half of the year.

Service Expansion & Improvement

The delivery of this aspect of our strategy didn't quite align with what was planned – and that's okay.

We went live with Peertube back in April, and it's been our most successful service by far.

We also launched this WriteFreely instance, and the Fediverse.Games Magazine.

We had Community Game Servers and a Federated Identity platform on the cards during the year, however no real progress was made toward implementing either of these, and at this stage I don't see any real demand for either of these. They'll probably not be part of our 2026 strategy, but there's always the possibility we could introduce them during the year if there's a need or desire.

Financial Security & Sustainability

There's never been an urgent need for this as I can comfortably finance all our operations, but it was good to get our donation platforms up and running, and see our first donations come through. For those who contributed through the year – thank you!

I definitely want to get us established as a registered legal entity (potentially a not-for-profit) during this year, but there are significant amounts of work and not-insignificant amounts of money required to make this happen – so we'll see.

Moving Forward in 2026

2025's been a tough year. Hate permeates pretty much every facet of our society. World leaders appear intent on putting civil rights and science back decades at the minimum. People are struggling financially, physically, emotionally.

I want to foster a community where everyone is welcome, and intolerance is not tolerated. And I hope I've demonstrated that commitment personally as well.

I haven't considered what our 2026 strategy will look like at this stage. However it's unlikely there will be many major changes to our services – the focus is likely to be on continuing service improvement and optimisation, as well as giving back to the community and to the projects that have helped us along the way.

Hope everyone has an enjoyable holiday season, and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!

Bob Dendry