Demigodrick

Hi All,

Hope everyone had a good October and enjoyed the spooky season!

Just dropping in again to give an overview of what is happening with the server and what we've been working on, along with the usual graphs and stuff 😁

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Here's some communities you might be interested in!

• All Things Tom Scott - A community dedicated to the YouTuber, presenter, and media personality Tom Scott!
• Data Breaches - Information about data breaches, data leaks, ransomware attacks, and other related stories.
• Starfield - Discussion of the Bethesda game Starfield
• Game Deals - A comprehensive overview of all the games on sale (or free!) across the PC world.

New Communities

Since my last post, there have been a couple of new communities you might be interested in checking out:

• Cyberpunk
• Reverse: 1999

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Server Updates

So we've been working on a few things over the last couple of weeks, including revamping some of the "admin-run" communities (Gaming, Home and Announcements) with new icons (and a banner!).

We've also comprehensively updated our Legal documentation. Previously our Terms of Service was on the Legal tab, but we've found this hasn't been a good way to clearly display information or to add further information to. So we've introduced legal.lemmy.zip with all the legal documentation (i.e. cookie policy, terms of service, code of conduct) and this allows us to easily add more as we need, or update quickly and clearly. Please have a look and let us know what you think!

We've also been working on a public dashboard for server performance so we can continue to be transparent about how the server is run. A preview of what we've got working so far:

We're not quite ready to have this accessed publicly, but hopefully it won't be too long!

ZippyBot has also had some fairly substantial updates, including the ability to broadcast messages to all users, adding news articles to the gaming community, and the biggest of all is that Zippy has replaced the slur filter we used to have in place. Now, rather than remove a word on the slur list regardless of context (which stifled discussion and prevented users here from taking part in discussions on external instances) Zippy will report any comments or posts containing a word on the slur list, and the moderator of the community can make a decision on how to resolve that. This should be a much more hands off and flexible approach to handling this.

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Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

If you’re new to Lemmy.zip - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

I wanted to take a moment to encourage everyone to actively engage with our platform. Your participation can take many forms: upvoting content you enjoy, sharing your thoughts through posts and comments, sparking meaningful discussions, or even creating new communities that resonate with your interests.

Your involvement is vital in shaping and nurturing our Lemmy.zip instance. It’s natural to see fluctuations in user activity over time, and we’ve seen this over the wider lemmy-verse for some time now. However, if you’ve found a home here and love this space, now is the perfect opportunity to help us thrive.

Together, we can make Lemmy.zip an even more vibrant and welcoming space for everyone. Thank you for being part of our community!

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Donations

As always, we're extremely thankful to people who are kind enough and in a position to donate. You can always see the instance's financial position on OpenCollective, and what we're aiming towards. If you do donate, you'll get your name in the Thank You Thread.

We're currently in a stable financial position, with around 10 months of funding in the pot. This is a great position to be in, but our ask is that if you've been enjoying your time here, please consider a donation. We'd love to be able to save enough to switch to a dedicated server in the future which would improve performance and make the site snappier and more responsive.

Want to help but not in a position to do so financially? Then please remember to interact with the instance! The more users who interact = the better Lemmy.zip becomes!

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Server Performance

Time for graphs and some stats!

First is the usual Hetzner CPU usage over the last 30 days:

And second is the Hetzner network stats for the last 30 days:

I'm also including a little sneak peak of the other dashboard we'll soon be sharing with real time performance stats:

Here's our image hosting stats:

And here are some Cloudflare stats. For those that aren't aware, Cloudflare had a bit of a whoopsie the past couple of days, hence why the graphs drop to 0 for a bit! Thankfully Lemmy.zip was fine and continued to work during this.

Overall stats over 30 days:

More detailed overview of traffic through Cloudflare over the last 30 days:

Traffic from regions over the last 30 days:

And finally unique visitor stats over the last 30 days:

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Finally, I'd like to thank everyone for being here and helping to build Lemmy.zip into what it is. As always, if you have any questions please put them below or feel free to drop me a message.

Demigodrick

Hi All,

Small amount of site maintenance to take place, which will include a server restart so there will be some downtime during this 1 hour window.

Site status can be seen on the status page.

Thanks,

Demigodrick

Edit 1: Maintenance is now underway. I'll update this post when complete.

Edit 2: Site upgrade is complete, but some extra work is taking place so the window will be extended for another hour, until 13:00 UTC.

Edit 3: Done!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7291022

Some months have passed on since the Reddit blackout this June. It led to an explosive growth in Lemmy users, and lots of urgent work in scaling, bug fixes, user onboarding and more. Since then things have calmed down significantly, giving us breathing room and time to get more long-term work done.

As of Nov. 2023, Lemmy is at ~36k active daily users 🥳 (those who have posted or commented within the last month). While user counts are not an explicit goal of ours, this is still a tremendous achievement, and one which we can all be proud to be a part of. It shows that people truly do want alternatives to US tech companies, and will use them if they exist.

Join-Lemmy Redesign

Most recently we've been working on a redesign of join-lemmy.org to provide a better onboarding experience and cater towards new users. This includes:

• A helpful new instance picker to reduce choice overload.
• The instances page is now filterable, based a set of topics and languages, as well as sortable based on activity. The default sort is Random, to encourage people to join smaller servers.
• The apps page now has sections for Android, iOS, and web apps, as well as libraries. Feel free to do a pull request to add any apps that are missing.
• The donate page now shows the total amount of monthly donations across all platforms. More details below.
• The technology used is Typescript with tailwind and daisyUI CSS frameworks.

For server admins: If your instance isn't listed already, you must explicitly add your server topics and languages by doing a pull request to this file.

As you may have noticed, texts on the website are unchanged, and images on the main page are still generic placeholders. We are hoping for your contributions to improve them. For the texts, edit this file. Translations are managed via weblate. Images are located in this folder. If you are good with AI tools, consider replacing main_federation.webp and similar with more colorful images. More main_screen_x.webp images with custom themes or alternative frontends would be nice too. In general feel free to open issues or pull requests for improvements to the site.

Funding Drive

Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

We've known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet's resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Recurring donations from Lemmy users are the most sustainable solution for the future. It also means that we need to worry less about funding, and can focus more on improving Lemmy. And instead of being accountable to an external organization, we work directly for Lemmy's users. While one-time donations are also welcome, they are too unpredictable for long-term planning.

You can find available donation options on the donate page. This page was also updated during the redesign to display current donations and funding goals. If each active Lemmy user donated ~€0.33 per month it would be enough for 3 full-time developers. So please consider donating if you use Lemmy every day. Our preferred donation platform is Liberapay because it doesn't have any payment fees or delays, and is itself open source.

Besides Lemmy's developers, please consider donating to those who develop open-source apps or software for the Lemmy ecosystem, as well as server admins and moderation teams who are the backbone of the Lemmyverse. We would be happy to add donation links for the above to join-lemmy.org as well!

If you have any suggestions in regards to the topics mentioned in this post, please let us know. We also want to use this opportunity to thank the countless contributors who are working on Lemmy now.