Hey all,

That time of the week again, and it is time to see how things have been going over the last week (and a bit)!

In case you've not read them, and want some light Sunday reading:
Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7

TL;DR

• Small Lemmy update to 0.18.4
• Small uptime wins
• Change to front-end clients
• Administration & Defederation policy
• Funding
• Interaction
• Stats

Lemmy updated to 0.18.4

We quietly updated to 0.18.4 following its release. Only minor changes to comments and misc fixes, with no changes to the database, so we were pretty confident about this one not crashing the server! Thankfully we had 0 downtime and the update was applied seamlessly.

Uptime wins

Previously we've been having issues with the server spiking and crashing, the DB locking up and causing the back-end to freeze, and general odd behaviour. Many other instances faced these issues too. I'm glad to say over the last week (and a bit) we've had 100% uptime since the upgrade to 0.18.3 was applied, which has been great. I've also tweaked the nginx settings to prevent old.lemmy.zip from timing out so often due to rate limiting.

Front end Clients

Following the release of Voyager as an app we've moved the front-ends around a little for those not aware.

• m.lemmy.zip now leads to the Photon front end
• v.lemmy.zip now leads to Voyager if people still want to use it as a web app
• old.lemmy.zip still leads to the reddit look-alike.
• beta.lemmy.zip now doesn't lead anywhere.

This isn't the end of the movements we're making, Photon will likely have a new home (probably p.lemmy.zip or photon.lemmy.zip) and we're always looking for cool new front-ends to implement.

If there are any other front-ends you've seen that you'd like us to host, let me know.

Administration and Defederation Policy

Following this week's recent events, we've implemented an Administration and Defederation Policy to make it clear when and how we as an admin team take action.

Please have a read and let me know if you have any questions.

Funding

Our users continue to be incredibly generous, and we're in a really solid position with funding at the moment. I am continuing to keep the OpenCollective website updated with expenses if you want to have a nosy, and if feel you want to donate be assured every single bit goes to keeping the server going (and if we are secure enough, we'll be upgrading the server for better performance).

Anyone who does donate will get their 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.

Interaction

Just a quick hello to all new Lemmy.zip users - I hope you're enjoying your time here on Lemmy!

This is my general weekly reminder to new and existing users that interaction is what keeps Lemmy growing. An upvote here, a quick comment there... it all goes to keeping Lemmy growing.

If you see content you like, please interact with it!

Stats

Now for the interesting bit :)

CPU usage over the last 7 days:\

Some network stats:

Backblaze image storage stats:

(Well on our way to 100gb!)

Cloudflare stats over the last 7 days:

And finally, the race between Finland and the USA is back on, with the USA creeping narrowly back into the lead:

This week's post was brought to you by Fred Again's Boiler Room set.

Thats all there is this week, hopefully normal service will resume! As always, let me know if there is anything else you'd like to see.

Demigodrick.

Hello all,

Over the last 48 hours the community has had the opportunity to vote on defederating with Exploding Heads and rammy.site (as an extension of Exploding Heads following its abandonment).

Before we move on to the result, I just want to add that there are no winners or losers here, and rather this is a vote we had to call because the moderation tools for Lemmy users and for Lemmy admins are not yet robust enough, and that in the future we hope that the real best outcome will be to allow users to choose to defederate/block instances entirely.

The results of the poll are as follows:
76% of votes were to defederate, with 24% of the vote to not defederate.

Based on the majority of votes, we've now implemented the block on those instances.

If/when the robust moderation tools are in place in the future, we will revisit this block and look instead to block problematic communities.

I appreciate everyone taking the time to vote, and all the discussion that has taken place around this topic. It has also helped the admin team to better be aware of our responsibilities to yourselves as users of this instance, and our instance's footprint in the wider fediverse.

I also need to mention we've been made aware of illegal content on the burggit.moe instance involving depictions of underage children in sexual acts. Even in cartoon style, these are illegal in many countries, including the UK, and so we've implemented a block on that instance too under the "illegal content" clause in our Defederation Policy. Upon review it appears we had very few (i.e. 1) subscribers to most of these communities on that instance, and so we don't believe this will have any impact on the current userbase.

Hello all,

Following the post earlier this week on defederation, we are now putting the vote to the community.

The question for the vote is:

Should Lemmy.zip defederate from EH (and Rammy.site)?

You can vote by sending a message (click here) to ZippyBot with the following text:

To vote yes, send #vote 1 yes

To vote no, send #vote 1 no

ZippyBot will message you back to confirm it has recorded your vote.

These are the rules you need to be aware of:

• You can only vote once
• There is a minimum age on the account of 3 days. If your account is under 3 days old, ZippyBot will record your vote but it wont be counted.
• If you vote anything other than the above two options, ZippyBot will record your vote but it won't be counted.
• The vote will last for 48 hours at which point it will be closed.
• You must be a Lemmy.zip user to use the bot (PMs from accounts not local to Lemmy.zip will be rejected).

If you have any issues with your vote, please DM me here or on Matrix.

Coincidence?

Administration and defederation policy for lemmy.zip

This post aims to clarify principles for how administration and federation is done on lemmy.zip. It is intended to be an overview of general guidelines, not a formal set of rules.

Instance rules

This instance has a set of rules which are always visible on the sidebar of the front page. All users of this instance are expected to follow these rules in all of their activities, including:

• Community moderation
• Posting
• Commenting

⚠️ Our rules apply even when you're posting in a community on another instance. For example, this means that you're not allowed to post advertisement spam using your lemmy.zip account on any other instance (even if that other instance has no rules).

Each community hosted on lemmy.zip is free to have additional rules in addition to our instance wide rules, but instance rules supercede any community rules and must always be enforced.

Responsibilities

Admins

• Ensure that there are no communities on lemmy.zip which break lemmy.zip rules
• Ban lemmy.zip users who break our rules on other instances
• Ban users who consistently break rules across multiple communities
• Purge illegal content from lemmy.zip

Moderators

• Ensure that posts and comments in their communities don't break rules
• Ban users from their communities for consistently breaking rules

Users

• Downvote low quality content
• Report rule violations

⚠️ Admins are not responsible for censoring content from other instances.

In exceptional cases (illegal or extremely disturbing content), admins will step in and purge the content from lemmy.zip servers, but in general it is understood that our instance rules do not apply to external users on other instances, and censoring and curating external instances for our users is not a function for lemmy.zip admins.

Defederation

Lemmy is a federated network, so a lot of content will be posted on other instances. It is possible to limit which instances lemmy.zip is federated with, this is called defederation.

Defederating another instance has the following effects:

• Our users will stop seeing new posts and comments from users of the defederated instance (on all instances)
• Users of the defederated instance will stop seeing new posts and comments from our users
• Users of the defederated instance will be prevented from participating in communities hosted on lemmy.zip

As mentioned above, it is not a goal for lemmy.zip to censor and curate external instances. While there are certainly instances which contain content that wouldn't be allowed on this instance, breaking our rules outside of this instance is not by itself enough of a reason for us to defederate other instances.

We absolutely will defederate any instance which is posting illegal or extremely questionable content. This is up to the discretion of our admins. Some concrete examples of instances which we would defederate:

• An instance which is focused on creating spam in the network
• An instance which systematically allows large groups of users to break lemmy.zip rules in communities hosted on lemmy.zip
• An instance which is knowingly spreading CSAM into the federated network

Where an instance is dedicated to creating questionable content, we won't immediately defederate but will instead ask the community to vote on what they would like to happen next. We will announce these votes in advance, and users can place their vote during the stated time period.

It is important to note that while a vote is driving factor in the choice to defederate, there may be cases where the admins will decide to defederate anyway, against the outcome of a community vote, if remaining federated would jeopardise the lemmy.zip instance.

Users of lemmy.zip can request a vote at any time by sending a message to an admin, preferably with evidence of the instance's questionable content, and the administration team will discuss taking it forward to public vote.

What should I do if I see content I don't like on another instance?

• If it's low quality content, you should always downvote ⬇️
• If you think it breaks local rules for the community or instance, then report it and local admins/mods will deal with it
  • Your reports will also reach lemmy.zip admins, so if it's about illegal content, then we can purge it from lemmy.zip servers
• If it's just some user being an idiot, then you can block that specific user (lemmy.zip admins will not take action in case of external users posting on external communities)
• If it's a community dedicated to being awful in some way, then you can block that specific community in your user settings.

Defederated Instances

This is a list of the Defederated Instances and the reasons behind the defederation. We will also link to the related discussions.

• Threads
• Exploding Heads
• Rammy.site
• burggit.moe

(Thanks to lemm.ee for the original version of this)

Hello all,

This is a heads up that this weekend we will be asking the community to vote on defederating with Exploding Heads and Rammy.site, following an increase in their content making its way into our instance and moderation queue.

This content borders on illegal in my/the servers locality (if it was to be clearly iilegal we would have defederated with them immediately to protect the instance) and is usually hate-filled and targeted towards minorities.

So far we've had very little to do with them, but have come across some posts wishing (although not directly stating) harm on trans people and other minorities.

My personal take is the content being generated in those communities is not the content that this community needs to see or be a part of. Given the increasing visibility of this content coming over to us, I feel now is the time for the community to vote.

However, as I have said from the start, these decisions are not mine to take alone, and are for the community to come together to agree on. I never take defederation lightly, and have not defederated with any other instance (except threads) yet. Therefore this is a decision for the community to weigh in on.

In order to protect users here the vote will be held anonymously (we'll release details on Friday), and we encourage discussion to be held on our Matrix space so as to prevent users here being targeted for any views.

The vote will be held at some point on Friday and run for 48 hours over the weekend to give everyone time to vote.

For transparency, I have not reached out to EH mods (and the rammy.site admin is no longer active or moderating their instance) as I don't think this would produce any valuable discussion, they're unlikely to change their instance's purpose for us.