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Lemmy.zip instance discussion.
For all things relating to Lemmy.zip.
Main instance rules apply, with the additional rules below:
- This community is intended for Lemmy.zip users only. Comments or posts from external instance users will be removed at the admin's discretion. Repeat offenders will be banned.
founded 1 year ago
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cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/288913
Thanks for joining in! The canvas is now finished!
I’m going to be leaving the canvas up and read-only for a couple days, but not too long.
This was incredibly fun to host, thank you all for participating! ♥
Future Events
I’d love to make this a yearly event. Expanding from just Lemmy to the entirety of the fediverse aswell!
I’ll reuse this Lemmy community & the Matrix space for that event
If you have suggestions for future events, post them in a comment on this post, each suggestion as it’s own comment so people can vote on them
Timelapses:
- First 24h
- 24h - 48h
- 48h - 72h
- Start to finish
Data:
- Pixel Placement Logfile (timestamps, usernames, coords, pallete index, no ip addresses) (42mb)
- Pallete Indexes (eg 0 = black, 1 = dark gray, etc)
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https://canvas.toast.ooo/#x=590&y=688&scale=6
Huge shoutouts to @[email protected] for filling so much in, as well as @[email protected] @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected], and everyone else who added even just one pixel!
(I don't think there's any way to see total contributions in an area so I just kinda picked around randomly. So sorry if you had a decent chunk but I missed you, lmk and I'll make sure to add you to the list!)
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Hey all,
I didn't have chance to do one of these last week because of the upgrade/database issue, and I won't have chance to do one this weekend because I'm visiting family and won't be near anything but my phone. So thought I would do a midweek one to try and keep to some regularity :)
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6
TL;DR
- Lemmy update - We're on 0.18.3 but we did have issues!
- Small images change - Everything is .webp!
- Front-end clients - They've all been updated!
- Canvas event - Our first Lemmy event!
- Funding - Thank you to those who've donated!
- Interaction - Lurking = bad / Interacting = good!
- Server update - Some graphs and pretty pictures!
Lemmy updated to 0.18.3
We did, after a couple of stressful days, update to 0.18.3. Our first attempt instantly failed prompting our first rollback in a while, which all happened in the space of a couple of minutes. Our second attempt appeared at first glance to have worked, but very quickly became apparent something had gone wrong during the upgrade.
Suddenly communities stopped loading, people's accounts had vanished and federation slowed to a crawl. The DB was spewing errors left, right, and centre. So we had no other choice but to roll back again and see if we could replicate the error in a testing environment, which resulted in the loss of about 12 hours of data.
Unfortunately spinning up an exact replica of an instance is not an easy or quick task, and even then federation won't work because you can't duplicate the encrypted keys of a running instance. However we got the testing environment to a state where we could confidently apply the upgrade and see what happened. We were able to use this data to ensure the steps we then took on the live site would keep the database intact during upgrade and thankfully we were able to then get the live update to work.
I do apologise for the disruption and extended downtime, its never something we want to do but upgrades are never quite as simple as the documentation would make out!
Just a reminder that if you can't access the site, you can visit status.lemmy.zip for updates, or join the Matrix chat where no doubt I'll be swearing at the server.
Images change
Just a heads up that we changed the config so that all images are stored in .webp format, as per best practice suggestions. This should decrease storage space slightly with higher resolution pictures, but my eyesight is so crap I can't tell the difference.
Front end clients update
For those that use them, the front-end clients have been updated to their latest versions, something I do each week. Currently we have the following front-ends:
- m.lemmy.zip - our mobile site
- beta.lemmy.zip - a beta front-end called Photon that I personally use quite a bit for either desktop or mobile.
- old.lemmy.zip - err, yeah, that site replica if its your sort of thing!
If anyone has any other suggestions for a front end they'd like to see hosted please let me know and I'll happily check it out and see if we can get it hosted.
Canvas event
This weekend the first Canvas Event will be running, and we were one of the first instances to say we'd jump on board with it. In order to participate you'll need to verify your account, which you can do with a code you'll be pm'd and enter into the website when it goes live. It would great to see a good turn out (and if anyone wants to recreate the lemmy.zip logo I'd fully support that 😉)
More detail on the event will be posted here closer to the time.
Funding
We continue to have a good level of funding from our supporters, which helps massively in keeping this instance running. I continue to keep the OpenCollective website updated, and if you want to donate you'll get your name in the Thank You Thread. If you use your real name and want me to put your Lemmy.zip username instead, please send me a PM and i'll update it ASAP.
If you're enjoying your time here, please do consider it. 100% of funds go to Lemmy.zip's upkeep and if we get enough funding we'll be able to improve the performance of the server.
Interaction
Welcome to all new Lemmy.zip users and I hope you're enjoying your time here!
This is a weekly reminder than interacting with the instance (up-voting, commenting, posting etc) goes incredibly far to helping to promote this instance. If you're usually a lurker that is fine, but please consider posting a comment or making a post in a community if you're enjoying the content there.
Server update
Pretty graph time! Unfortunately after a roll back we lose the last 7 days of CPU usage but hopefully in the future that won't be an issue. So i'll post what graphs I have for you:
Hetzner usage over the last 24 hours:
Tux being absolutely correct:
Image storage current stats:
On-server DB storage:
(this went from 67% to 31% following the upgrade)
Cloudflare stats over the last 7 days:
And finally visitor numbers over the last 7 days:
(Finland well and truly smashing the US now after a couple of weeks of being behind!)
Thats all this time, hopefully normal service to resume next week.
As always, if there is anything else you'd like to see in these let me know.
Thanks Demigodrick
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Hello everyone, I joined lemmy.zip today. I've been using lemmy.world for the past month and have decided to move out to the fringe. This instance looks amazing and I'm happy to have joined. Over at lemmy.world I mod a small community [email protected] and since its a small niche community lemmy.zip hasn't been syncing with it which is expected. When I try to subscribe to my community however I get an error and I was wondering if its just me. I've posted the error which seems to be an issue with the json format. I believe both instances are running the same version of lemmy so i wouldn't expect them to have issues fetching posts from each other.
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Hello all, that time of the week again!
In case you're new and want some context, here are the previous parts:
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5
TL;DR
- New Theme - Its very shiny!
- New front-end client - old.lemmy.zip!
- Bot updates - bot does even more than last time!
- Funding - Thank you so much!
- Interaction - Weekly reminder to not lurk!
- We want a mod or two - we promise not to refer to you as "landed gentry"!
- Server update - graphs and stuff!
New Theme
Sami has been hard at work looking at themes and tweaks to make Lemmy.zip stand out as a unique instance. Sami put together this awesome looking theme and we've applied it as the default theme so all new users get to see our glory. If you do notice any issues, let Sami know so he can look into it.
We've discussed other themes too, maybe a custom light mode theme so watch this space. You can set any theme you want in your user settings.
New front-end Client
In a bid to continue to provide cool ways to interact with Lemmy.zip, at the beginning of the week we set up and tested Old.Lemmy.Zip which is a really cool reddit-alike front end with features such as infinite scrolling. If that is your sort of thing, check it out! (We notice some of the bigger instances have copied us now :))
Bot Updates
Following on from last week when the bot PM'd all new users, the bot will now PM anyone who creates a new community with helpful information on how to gain users and traction. It looks a little like this:
We're still working on adding suggestions so if you have any you think would be useful for new moderators to get users, let me know and I can add them in to the PM.
Funding
As always, a massive thank you to those who continue to support Lemmy.zip financially.
As we've existed over a month now we're starting to see invoices rolling in which have been added to OpenCollective, and we'll continue to add these as we get them. Once we're in a clearer position r.e. long term funding, we'll look to invest in an improved server. Hopefully we can share more info come August.
Interaction
Welcome to all the new users of Lemmy.zip this week, whether you're just browsing different instances or have made Lemmy.zip your home.
As I like to drone on about, Lemmy lives or dies on content and interaction. So if you were previously a lurker, please don't be afraid to join in. This isn't Reddit. You're not fighting against bot spam and power mods. Everyone is genuinely interested in your opinion here.
Please make sure to vote, comment, and create posts or communities :)
A call for Mods!
We're looking at growing our "official" (I'm not sure thats the right word but it will have to do!) communities on Lemmy.zip and are looking for one or two people who would like to help out. Currently that would be the Home and Gaming communities, but we're open to the creation of other communities.
If this is something you'd be interested in doing, please join our Matrix Chat and either send me a PM or let us know in the chat, and we can discuss further. There aren't any restrictions (preferably a Lemmy.zip user who is active) and we'll consider anyone interested on a case by case basis.
Server updates
Time for the fun graphs!
This is the CPU usage over the last week.
And here are some bonus network related graphs over the last week:
Our image bucket continues to fill up nicely:
And here are our Cloudflare stats over 7 days:
Not much has changed in the way of visitor traffic, USA still tops the leaderboard:
And here is our bandwidth over the last 30 days:
Interestingly the numbers seem to show that Saturday is the least busy day for us, with an early/mid-week peak!
That's all this week, but as always let me know if there is anything else you'd like to know about.
Thanks
Demidogrick
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Hello all,
That time of the week again! In case you haven't already read them:
Previous Parts
TL;DR
- Lemmy version update - completed to 0.18.2!
- Mobile site - tap away!
- Bot updates - cool bot does even more stuff!
- Email - we have more emails now!
- Lemmy.zip interaction - please interact!
- Funding - thanks!
- Server update - a few fun graphs!
Lemmy update
At the beginning of the week we attempted to upgrade to 0.18.2 a couple of times, each time resulting in the UI not talking to the backend server software and leaving a blank Lemmy page with no interaction. It appears that mobile apps that queried the backend directly continued to work.
Thankfully we backed up before the upgrade (and have daily backups anyway) and did a restore, but this took upwards of 20 minutes to rebuild. After a couple of attempts of this, we gave up testing in production and spun up a temp dev site so we could run further tests without impacting user exeperience.
Thankfully on the dev site we were able to work out that the issue lay with the extra security measures introduced in 0.18.2 and so we worked backwards (with some external help) to figure out it was an issue being caused by Cloudflare's Rocket Loader functionality, which was causing a violation with the new security measures. I toggled the switch in Cloudflare and everything immediately started working, and so we applied this to live and everything upgraded straight away.
Not a fun period of time but I look at it as a learning experience!
PS - we have a chat on Matrix where you can keep up to date on whats going on, get the latest updates etc. Anyone is free to join!
Mobile Site
For those not aware, we now have a mobile site hosted on the server. This is the Voyager software (previously known as Wefwef) - It is a webapp that you can install to your homescreen.
You can see the site by going to (https://m.lemmy.zip). While anyone from any instance can use it, its tailored towards Lemmy.zip users.
Bot Updates
Zippybot continues to get smarter. Zippybot will now PM new users to Lemmy.zip upon signup, so they can get all the information they need straight away.
This is a copy of the PM new users will get:
This has allowed us to unpin the "Read Me" post from the Local page so you should have a cleaner browsing experience, and we'll reserve stickied posts in Local to announcements or short term posts like this one.
The bot is being worked on to help provide advice, suggestions and guidance when users interact with certain parts of the instance, i.e. signing up. We'll look to expand this to creating new communities shortly, and then we'll continue to look for ways to help out.
We've changed email providers from Brevo (who allowed 300 emails a day) to another provider that allows 300 emails per hour. It also now allows us to send and receive email from other accounts now, and so our new contact email is [email protected]. If you have any questions you're more than welcome to email us at that address.
Interaction
As always we'd like to welcome new users to Lemmy.zip, and you can find some really helpful information here and here.
What I'd really to encourage people to do is interact. There are lots of memes popping up about it and lots of posts explaining the importance. We don't have a userbase the size of Reddit, so what we need is people to be that core userbase Reddit had and become posters not lurkers.
Lemmy will live and die based on your interactions with both this instance and the wider Lemmyverse so please, if you create an account, subscribe to what interests you and then create posts, upvote, and comment on everything you can!
We have an open community create policy so feel free to create communities on subjects that interest you.
Funding
I'd once again like to thank everyone who has donated towards the upkeep of Lemmy.zip, it has allowed us to expand and improve the experience in many ways.
We're pretty much sorted, as things currently stand, for the next 10 to 12 months. However we'd like to upgrade the server for better performance, improve page loading times and look to expand the functionality of Lemmy.zip. So if you've been enjoying Lemmy.zip and would like to see it grow, please consider donating.
Server update/graphs
Now for the fun part!
This is CPU usage of the server over the last 24 hours. Due to restoring the server within the last 7 days I can't pull usage graphs for it, but will be able to show these next week again.
Here you can see the image storage stats:
Almost 40 gigs of images!
Here are the Cloudflare stats over the last 7 days:
And here are the visitor numbers:
USA has pulled in front of Finland again!
Thats all for now, but if there are any other stats you'd like to see, let us know!
Thanks Demigodrick
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We have successfully upgraded to 0.18.2. It only took the best part of 5 hours, 4 restored backups and a whole temporary dev site spun up to figure out it was one tiny setting in Cloudflare that was causing all the issues. The joy.
I'm off to bed with an incredible headache. I sincerely apologise for all the downtime this evening/day, it is not something I want to make a habit of.
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Hi All,
That time of the week again!
I've decided to combine these topics together as they're somewhat related and I don't want to spam people's home pages with more than 2 pinned posts at any one time.
Previous Parts
TL:DR
- Threads Vote - We'll defederate for now
- Lemmy.zip interaction - please interact!
- Bot updates - cool bot does stuff!
- Funding - thanks!
- Server update - bigger server faster website!
Threads (Threxit)
Following the poll for defederation with Threads, the community has voted and has decided that this instance should defederate from Threads.
Therefore within the next few hours I'll be adding Threads.net to the defederation list, and we'll keep an eye out in case there is a different URL they use for federation. However, this is not a final say - we'll monitor how Meta connects to the fediverse and what impact this has on Lemmy, if any.
I am all for user choice/independence, so if the Lemmy devs add the option for users to set their own federation stances then we will look to use that instead of having the instance be defederated in totality.
As a community you get a say in what happens, so if there is strong enough feeling that we want to federate with them in the future, it will go back out as a vote.
It is also important to note that Threads is not yet using ActivityPub and we don't know if/when that move will happen. This is a preemptive decision.
Interaction
Just a reminder that platforms like this one live or die based on interaction with the content. I've seen stats that suggest over 90% of users on social media are lurkers, which ties up closely with our stats too. We have just broken the 1000 registered uses mark (Woo! 🥳) and so we're looking at ways to encourage participation on the instance. We will also look at how we introduce new users and what tools we can implement to encourage them to introduce themselves and contribute to communities.
Please, if you're a lurker and you're reading this, pop into a community and join in with the discussion. Lemmy needs you!
Bot updates
I've been working on a "friendly" bot that will allow users to interact with it in various ways, including using it to vote on polls, providing information to new users and anything else I can manage to get working. Thanks to those who helped test out the #score functionality, the bot passed with flying colours.
If you know anything about Python and databases, please hit me up on Matrix.
For anyone interested the git repo is here
Funding
We continue to have some very generous support from Lemmy.zip users. Thank you all who have donated or are thinking about it. As I'll go into in a minute, we've grown to a point where the server needed to be upgraded which produces additional costs.
Therefore if you’ve been enjoying Lemmy.zip and want to see it stick around, please consider donating. The first option is a "one time donation" option and the other three are recurring options.
Anything you're comfortable sparing will go 100% towards keeping Lemmy.zip running.
I've also started to add expenses to OpenCollective, so as the invoices start to roll in, you'll be able to see what we're spending on the server.
Server Update
There are two big server updates this week. Firstly, we've increased the performance of the server, and secondly we've upgraded to Lemmy 0.18.1.
Both of these have brought performance improvements with them, which is great. Since upgrading, we've had no 502 errors (where Lemmy.zip goes offline for 5 or so minutes) and we've not had to force-restart the server either.
Our server is now "CPX21" with Hetzner for those interested - 3 vcpus, 4gb RAM and we've doubled the storage space to 80GB for the Lemmy database etc.
This is the CPU usage over the last 7 days:
This is the storage space on the server now:
Not much interesting has happened with emails this last week, these are the stats though:
Our images storage continues to grow quite nicely too:
And our Cloudflare stats show some lovely figures:
We also appear to be more popular in Finland now than the USA!
1 Month Old
Finally, Lemmy.zip turns 1 month old tomorrow. I'd just like to thank everyone that has been here and contributed to this lovely community, everyone that has donated, anyone that has made a suggestion or provided advice to help grow this instance and special thanks to Sami who has spent lots of his time helping out on the backend and keeping things running smoothly.
Thanks all,
Demigodrick
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