To the members of SJW, our friends across the Fediverse, and the curious passersby, this update is for you.

Now that we are well into 2026, I wanted to look back at how 2025 unfolded and share some insight into SJW’s finances, infrastructure, traffic trends, and priorities for the year ahead.

2025 Finances

One of the biggest changes in 2025 was the introduction of member-supported funding.

In January of 2025, I opened donations to help cover the cost of operating SJW. The goal was to begin moving away from a model funded entirely by me and toward a community-supported model that can remain financially sustainable over the long term.

Throughout 2025, we received $3,239.41 in net donations and spent $1,396.14 on operational expenses.

During the year, we also experienced a few hardware failures, most notably a failed power supply and hard drive. Thanks to the redundancy built into our servers, neither failure resulted in a service disruption.

I was able to repurpose a compatible power supply from a decommissioned server at no cost. I also personally covered the replacement hard drive before prices went through the roof. While donation funds could have covered these expenses, I wanted to preserve as much of the balance as possible for a larger hardware upgrade.

All amounts below are in Canadian dollars.

This year, I hope we can raise enough to help purchase newer hardware. Unfortunately, as many of you are probably aware, the rapid growth of AI infrastructure has significantly increased the price and demand for many server components.

Traffic Trends

This is where things become particularly interesting and, at first glance, a little puzzling.

Based on our traffic logs and Cloudflare data, overall traffic approximately doubled during 2025, despite SJW adding only around 4,000 active accounts during the same period.

As of January 2026, when I first began preparing this update, Cloudflare was reporting:

• More than 300 million pages served per month
• Approximately 6 million unique visitors over a 30-day period

These are enormous numbers, but they almost certainly do not represent six million individual people.

I suspect that at least 50 to 60 percent of this activity, and possibly more, comes from bots, scrapers, automated crawlers, vulnerability scanners, archival services, and other automated systems. Some of this activity may also come from services gathering public information for traditional search engines and newer AI-powered search tools.

I recently implemented Anubis to help reduce abusive automated traffic. While it cannot prevent every bot or scraper from accessing the site, it makes large-scale automated collection more difficult and has helped us begin addressing the problem.

Hardware and Infrastructure

Given these traffic trends and some of the performance issues we have encountered, our current hardware is reaching the point where I need to seriously consider replacing or upgrading it.

I recently changed our Lemmy deployment to use horizontal scaling. In simpler terms, we now run multiple Lemmy service instances in parallel and distribute incoming traffic between them. This has helped improve the instance’s ability to handle periods of heavier activity.

However, software improvements can only take us so far. Newer hardware would give us more capacity, better performance, and additional room to build resilience into the platform.

I would also like to explore bringing our primary S3-compatible object storage in-house while maintaining an appropriate off-site backup strategy. This would reduce our reliance on third-party storage providers while giving us more control over privacy, performance, and redundancy.

2026 Priorities

Our main infrastructure priorities for 2026 are:

• Upgrade or replace aging server hardware
• Add further redundancy to critical services
• Continue improving horizontal scaling
• Reduce the impact of abusive automated traffic
• Explore self-hosted object storage
• Deepen our collaboration with Fedecan

Fedecan

As some of you may remember, we previously shared our intention to join Fedecan, an organization with which we share common values and a similar vision for the Canadian Fediverse.

That transition has now been finalized. SJW is associated with a registered Canadian nonprofit organization and can benefit from its banking, administrative, and nonprofit structure.

The initial banking and legal integration is complete, but our collaboration will continue to deepen as we work toward a larger shared vision and develop common guidelines.

Donations are now processed through Fedecan, but funds donated specifically to SJW are tracked separately and remain reserved for SJW’s operating costs, infrastructure improvements, and future service expansion.

Donations

As outlined above, one of our main goals this year is to upgrade our existing hardware and improve the resilience of the services supporting SJW.

I am still evaluating the available hardware options and will share more specific information once the upgrade plan and expected costs have been finalized.

If you have the means and would like to support SJW, donations of any size are greatly appreciated. Every contribution helps us maintain the instance, prepare for future growth, and reduce how much of the operating cost must be covered personally.

Regardless of how much we raise, I'm committed to keeping SJW running. I will continue looking for suitable replacement hardware and am prepared to personally contribute toward any shortfall required to support the next generation of our infrastructure.

If you'd like you can contribute through either of the following platforms:

• Liberapay
• Ko-fi

Thank You

In closing, I want to thank our admins and mods, who continue to volunteer their time to help make SJW a safe and welcoming place.

I also want to thank our members who have chosen to make the Fediverse, and SJW in particular, their home. Whether you donate, contribute to discussions, report problems, help other members, or simply spend time here, you are part of what keeps this community alive.

Thank you for being you.

And if nobody has reminded you lately: you are great, you are loved, and most importantly, you are enough.

TheDude ✌️