i was expecting it to have maybe 20 accounts total, but as of today we have 236 total and 110 active accounts according to the about page. (An active account is one that's been logged into within the last 30 days). I thought most people would drop and leave, so it's surprising that about half of everybody is still active to some extent. I don't think I properly comprehend how many people are here, since it feels pretty small to me. I think I base it on the local timeline, which only has people's public posts and no reblogs.

When I started getting a small flood of people I didn't know, I was really nervous about them being random people who would cause trouble, but pretty much everyone has been nice and courteous. I think the other reason why it doesn't feel like a lot of people is because I was expecting moderation to become a nightmare, and being forced to make ban decisions about drama that I wasn't involved in, defederation drama, or similar things like that. however, I've only had a handful of reports on denden users this whole time and as far as I know we've only been defederated from one larger instance so far. (there is nothing I can do about it...)

I do feel nervous having to take care of the server with everyone's connection to the fediverse on it. I'm hosting it on my own server hardware so I can't rely on the protection that a vps would provide, but I do have automatic backups set up in case anything happens. I also do still get nervous about defederation sometimes. But despite all that I've met a lot of cool people through denden+fedi and it's definitely been worth it.