Transparency Report (August 2024)
Hi, everyone! My apologies for being late, but here's our official Transparency Report for August 2024!
Summary
I (Atlas) took a long-needed personal break from the project for a good chunk of August after working tirelessly to launch the platform the month prior. However, I was still working enough behind-the-scenes to get v1.2 out on September 1st! This was immediately followed by our second major downtime event due to an unavoidable incident with our hosting provider, but the platform was fully recovered within ~12 hours. We also launched the Octocommune, a sister-community to the project (feel free to join if you haven't already! It's where all of our general chats have gone).
As of now, our full attention is being turned towards preparing a private beta for iOS. This is largely blocked by my financial ability to acquire the hardware necessary to develop for the platform, as well as to launch a business surrounding the project. Speaking of…
My personal situation
Many of you know this, but for this project's entire existence, I've been an unemployed high school dropout. Octocon largely served as a way to occupy my time while I spent the rest getting a GED and tirelessly searching for a full-time job. After months of searching, I'm elated to announce that I've finally landed one! I should be starting within the next few weeks.
Updates will almost certainly slow down compared to our initial launch, as I won't have nearly as much time to dedicate to the project anymore. I deeply apologize for this, but I need to put my own financial stability first! I can't make any promises as to how much time will be dedicated to developing new features going forward, but I can promise at the very least that the platform will be kept stable and safe in its current state. That said, I'm still very passionate for the project, so I'll do my best to pump new features out as my mental health allows!
Forms
I've attached documents to the corresponding message on our Discord server detailing our income, expenses, and total savings, as well as a receipt of our server hosting invoice.
Note: Server hosting costs greatly increased as we used our new financial freedom following the Patreon launch to spin up servers in South America and Africa, improve the reliability of our databases, and future-proof the platform for the foreseeable future. Roughly half of our previous Patreon supporters canceled or downgraded their subscription (which is completely ok!), which resulted in our costs overshooting our income by $49.04. This deficit was paid out of our own pocket, and was not deducted from our emergency savings. It's important to note that these costs shouldn't be increasing for a very long time!
