First, I'd like to announce that I am a member of MIT's Media Lab International Hate Observatory Group (https://twitter.com/medialab/status/1111002533286371328). I will we be working with Ethan Zuckerman and others from MIT's Media Cloud and also with Harvard's Berkman Klein Institute. I recently helped with some data analysis for a paper published in the Columbia Journalism Review related to the Christchurch shoots (https://www.cjr.org/analysis/christchurch-shooting-media-coverage.php). I'm very excited to work with these amazing groups and it will open a lot of opportunities to bring exposure to Pushshift and our long-term goals.

Originally, I had planned to start rolling out the new API using Elasticsearch 6.x. However, with 7.0 right around the corner, I am waiting for it to reach GA status. It has a lot of great features and strong support for some more advanced SQL queries.

Also, I'm working to obtain two more servers to spread the load on the API. It still has room to grow, but occasionally some expensive queries cause minor disruptions. I'm still working on getting funds for this and I hope to have something within the next 4-6 weeks. In the meantime, I'm porting over a few features to the current API to keep things moving forward.

If anything has any general questions, feel free to ask!