The scope of this year's strategy is probably a fair bit smaller than what we aimed for last year – and that's okay. We don't have big ideas on expanding and adding new services, though this may happen along the way. Instead, this year we'll be focusing on governance.

The biggest piece of work we'll be working on this year is creating Fediverse.Games as an independent, incorporated association in NSW, Australia. Presently, all services, hardware and the like is owned directly by me (Bob Dendry) – which is fine, but means that the entity that is Fediverse.Games is tied directly to my person. By separating Fediverse.Games from myself, we can implement better governance and ensure money coming in from our users as donations can only be used for the purposes of furthering our community's goals.

There's a number of steps that are required to achieve this goal. There's a lot of clerical work including selecting Directors, drafting constitutions, member schedules and the like, which is likely to take some time to draft and review. Once this work is complete and approved by the regulating body, I will start to take steps to transfer physical resources (servers, drives) and the like over to the association as donations. There will still be some ownership crossover remaining – which we'll discuss along the way, but this will be transparently handled.

What is an Incorporated Association?

In simple terms, being an incorporated association means (my paraphrasing):

• Our small, not-for-profit entity can operate as a separate legal entity to me and anyone else who helps with our day-to-day running.
• We cannot provide assets or profits to enrich members (including myself)
• Management Committee members are protected from personal liability provided they act in good faith.
• There are governance requirements, including financial reporting, keeping accurate minutes and holding Annual General Meetings.

This isn't an exhaustive list. You can find more details on the NSW Government website

Membership

You can have your say and contribute to the ongoing running of our services by becoming a member. The structure of membership was something that we had to consider closely, as there are requirements under incorporated association rules we must meet. As such, we will offer two main classes of memberships, each with different perks and responsibilities:

• Full Voting Members: Full Voting Members are elligible to vote in general meetings, be part of the management committee and are able to assist with the day-to-day running of the organisation. The key sticking point with this class of membership is that we are legally required to gather voting members' real names and contact details – and legally are required to provide a list of member names to other full members of the organisation. I know for a lot of people this will be a sticking point, and I absolutely understand why this is the case. That is why we've provided the below member class:
• Associate Member: Associate Members are not elligible to vote in general meetings or be part of the management committee. Instead, they are able to financially support the association and will receive perks for doing so (note: membership fees are not a payment for service). We are required to collect the names of our Associate Members, however a pseudonym (like you use for your Mastodon or Peertube account) is absolutely acceptable. There will be different tiers of Associate Member, which will have different perks associated.

The membership fees and benefits schedule will be provided in due course, prior to our registration as an incorporated association.

What Do All These Changes Mean For You?

From an operational point of view? Nothing.

More broadly, becoming an association places an onus on us to utilise donated money purely to meet its objectives. We're already doing this, but formalising this requirement will hold us better to account.

Questions?

Reach out to me on Mastodon if you want to chat more or get involved.

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

There's some background to all of this. I've been working hard to make changes to some of our underlying tech that sits upstream of our main cluster, both for resilience and performance but also to decrease our cost base. We've been using BunnyCDN (affiliate link) to do this.

And to be clear, it's not Bunny's service that is causing the errors. It's that the changes being made require configuration in our cluster to support, and there have been some challenges in setting this up. This is both due to accumulated tech debt, previous misconfigurations, and in some cases just a lack of skill in configuring certain components, particularly Kubernetes Container Network Interfaces.

But it's not all bad news. The use of keepalive connection pooling, reconfiguring flows to reduce overhead on uploads, and the tweaking of resource allocation across our services has lead to a significant increase in upload throughput and response times, both of which are really important to our continued growth and the success of our platforms.

The main issue that has been plaguing us over the last week or so has been intermittent failures of inter-service connectivity between Mastodon, Peertube and our object storage. This has recurred a number of times despite different steps being made to attempt to resolve it. For Peertube – this primarily impacts uploads. For Mastodon, it impacts both uploads and the caching of remote images, such as avatars and attachments to posts.

The root cause of this appears to have been some funky caching going on of some of the virtual IPs we use for load balancing purposes in our cluster. We made some changes to our load balancing algorithm to improve performance. These changes failed, and were rolled back. For the large part the rollback was successful, however some iptables or similar changes appear to have persisted somewhere, causing the intermittent failure.

With this is now (hopefully) more fully resolved, our attention turns to how best to prevent this from happening in the future. I'm currently working on a suite of tools to periodically test the functionality of uploads on our services – not just that landing pages load correctly, but that uploads are successfully hitting our backend and loading to object storage.

This will take some time to fully develop, test and deploy. In the meantime I'm going to be uplifting our log monitoring to more quickly detect and alert to backend failures.

This isn't the post I was hoping to make – I was hoping to talk about the success we've had in using Bunny to reduce our cost base while increasing service performance. That post will come in the future, but I wanted to take the time to talk through our struggles over the last few weeks to keep you all informed on our progress against these challenges.

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.

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!

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