Demigodrick

Hello all,

We're sharing the exciting news that Lemmy.zip has taken steps towards being a publicly traded company. Yes, it's happening.

And because YOU helped make Lemmy.zip what it is today, you now have the opportunity to make us filthy rich (as we mine and sell our user's personal details to AI models) by buying an ownership stake in Lemmy.zip.

We're now opening our pre-registration website for all users who are interested in purchasing shares under our Registered Equity Distribution Direct Investment Track ("REDDIT") or for some lucky long time users, our Special User Collective Keynote Scheme ("SUCKS").

You can find the eligibility criteria for both the REDDIT and SUCKS scheme on our dedicated site, ipo.lemmy.zip

And because we're all about transparency (wink, wink!) we have also created a short video describing in intricate detail how these schemes will work, how the exploitation of the content our users upload will help to make you and us rich, and where you can buy your first private jet with the dividends. Just click here for more details.

To celebrate this occasion, we're working with AI artists to produce exclusive NFTs for IPO supporters and we will be releasing details on this as the IPO progresses.

If you have any questions, please keep them to yourself.

Give us your money,

The Lemmy.zip Admin Team.

Parents tearing their hair out over children spending hours gaming should instead be encouraging their creative use of tech, a recently-knighted AI millionaire has told the BBC.

Hi All,

By all accounts a pretty smooth transition over to the new server.

I'll be monitoring performance but initial outlook looks amazing. Lots of growing room.

In a couple of weeks I'll try and remember to do a test of a backup live to make sure our backup solution is working, as previously we could rely on Hetzner's cloud backup which was bloody handy.

Please let me know of any issues.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hey everyone,

We've started to hit the upper limit of what our current server is able to handle in terms of performance, and we've noticed its having a performance impact on the site itself.

For example, this is the CPU usage as I type this:

We're going to make the move to a much more powerful server, as we've done all we can on this one to control performance.

If all goes smoothly, I predict a couple of hours downtime while we migrate the database between servers and then move the surrounding services over.

The window is going to be 5 hours, so any posts made in this time will most likely be lost, especially if we have to roll back to the old server.

Once the update is done, Cloudflare should handle most of the DNS issues but you might need to hard refresh the site.

You can keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip for more information.

Please let me know if you have questions in the comments, but I will be doing a full breakdown in the next server update in a couple of days.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hello all,

You may have seen @[email protected]'s latest post regarding his new UI - as I love testing these things out, I've spun up this up at next.lemmy.zip.

Its very new and in active development, and you will be able to join in the conversation at the lemmy-ui-next community.

The new UI is described as:

Lemmy-ui-next is a brand new alternative frontend, built from the ground up with modern and popular tooling - a framework known as NextJS. Lemmy-ui-next has (or aims to have) the following high-level features:

• Open source (AGPL)
• Drop-in replacement for lemmy-ui - same exact URL structure, so all existing links will continue working
• Very plain & minimalistic UI, strongly inspired by other link aggregator sites (of course including the original lemmy-ui!)
• Very basic and "typical" NextJS architecture, to encourage open source contributions
• Fully functional even when JavaScript is disabled (but works better with JS enabled!)
• Optimized data transfer between your browser and the server (filtering out only relevant data from the Lemmy API, caching, memoization)
• Strong focus on privacy and security (all authentication with the Lemmy API is done through secure httpOnly cookies, user IP addresses are not leaked to external image hosts, etc)

Lots to do on this one, so there is an open window of 2 hours until 14:00 UTC.

During this time the site will be down intermittently, there may be backups restored too so any content posted during this window might be lost.

You can keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip for more info during this period.

Following @[email protected]'s announcement (here: https://lemmy.zip/post/11580990) I've spun up a test version of the new Wiki at wiki.lemmy.zip.

Community mods - if you fancy making a wiki for your community, now is your chance!

Its really very barebones at the moment, with no account management and very few tools, so please don't use the same password as you do here and please be mindful that, while I do daily backups, data on this site has a high probability of being lost.

That said, if you have 5 minutes please check it out, create a small article about something you care about, that sort of thing.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Demigodrick

Hey all - hope everyone has enjoyed their February and the extra day!

Here's a roundup of everything that has happened on Lemmy.zip over February and into March.

New Communities

We've had even more communities pop up this month, please check them out and subscribe if you like them!

• Star Trek
• The Amazing Digital Circus (Personal recommendation - I had no idea what to expect watching the pilot and enjoyed it very much!)

MaddieTian has also kindly brought the Xbox community back to life - please give it a sub and support it!

(PS - if you're a community mod and would like feature your community here, let me know and I'll happily pop it up here in April)

We still have one modless community - Apple - if you're interested in taking this over let me know.

---

Server Updates

It has been a bit of quiet month since last time. There have been no Lemmy releases but (at least from my perspective) most of the federation issues we had previously have been fixed and things seem a lot smoother.

The performance changes we'd also made to the server have appeared to worked wonders (again, thanks to locuester for their support with the database) and we're sitting quite happy performance wise, with no major unplanned downtime.

Last time I discussed that we had doubled the image size from 1mb to 2mb per image, and throughout February we've doubled that again to 4mb. This hasn't really had any impact on performance or storage, and I'm happy to keep it at 4mb for now, which should allow for quite good images. They still get compressed when they're uploaded but it shouldn't have too much of an impact. Here's a 3mb image i did some testing with.

Our feedback survey closed and we've taken a look at the results/comments and we're really thankful for all your responses. Many of you were very kind about the site which always makes me smile. The feedback isn't something we can report back as %s of answers, but we have taken on board comments and suggestions. One of my key things is to rewrite the instance rules to be clearer and flow better, and also to separate out the moderator community conduct bit as its own section and expand a bit on that.

What was interesting to see though was that many people have gone "all in" on the fediverse and replaced the large tech company apps with fediverse alternatives.

Finally, ZippyBot has had a very small update to make the report confirmations less spammy by limiting who they go to and in what circumstances. I've also changed the way we deal with urgent reports by keyword filtering in the report, so if you include something like "CSAM" in the report the admins will get pinged on matrix so we're at least aware faster of an issue.

In Zippy's next update i'm hoping to include the ability for mods to add RSS feeds to their community (including filtering for certain words) but it is quite a large task so taking me and my limited python knowledge a bit longer than I'd like to get it done - but I'm almost there! If there are any other tools mods feel they'd benefit from then let me know - happy to build them into Zippy.

---

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

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

I just want to let everyone know that the easiest way you can support Lemmy.zip is to actively engage with content here: upvoting content you enjoy, sharing your thoughts through posts and comments, sparking meaningful discussions, or even creating new communities that resonate with your interests.

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.

If you want to support us in a different way than financially, then actively interacting with the instance helps us out loads.

---

Donations

I hate banging on about money and I'm not very good at it, but here is the general reminder that Lemmy.zip only exists because of the generous donations of its users.

We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

Therefore, my ask is that if you’ve been enjoying your time here, please consider a donation - it will help keep Lemmy.zip online and all donations go to paying for the server and for the surrounding services like image hosting and email. We have options for one-off donations of any amount, or recurring donations at set amounts.

You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

---

Graph time

We've basically fully moved over to Grafana now for stats tracking, so here are some lovely graphs for you!, covering all of February.

Cpu:

Memory: (the dips are either server or database restarts)

Disk/storage:

Image storage:

Cloudflare overview:

Cloudflare requests:

Cloudflare bandwidth:

Cloudflare visitors:

Cloudflare traffic:

If there are any stats/graphs/insights i've not posted above but you'd like to see, let me know!

That's it for now - but as always if you have any questions pop them below or pm me.

Hope everyone has a lovely March and I'll be back again in April!

Cheers,

Demigodrick

Hi All,

It's been almost 6 months since our last feedback survey, and as we continue to mature as an instance I think it is really valuable for us as Admins to get a sense of how the community find this instance, and also the wider Lemmyverse/Fediverse.

There are some open ended questions with text boxes to fill in - all of the questions (except one) are optional, so you don't need to fill them in, but the more information you can fill in here, the better we can respond. Similarly, please be as open and honest about feedback as you can be, it all helps!

The question regarding your username is entirely optional, please only fill it in if you're comfortable doing so, and we may reach out afterwards to get more information from you. If you don't include a username, this survey is entirely anonymous (no IP address or referral link tracking).

To make sure only Lemmy.zip users can access the survey, you'll need an access code, which you can get by sending a pm to ZippyBot with the text #feedback and ZippyBot will reply with an access code. Apologies this is a bit convoluted, but we only want genuine answers from Lemmy.zip users.

The survey will initially be open for a two weeks, so no rush to fill it in.

To access the survey, go to feedback.lemmy.zip and enter the survey code you get from ZippyBot.

If you have any questions you can put them below, or you can send me a message.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi all, we've finally made it through January after what feels like 6 years, and we're into the second month of 2024!

Here's a nice little update on what has happened and is happening with Lemmy.zip at the moment.

New Communities

We've had a few new communities pop up this month, please check them out and subscribe if you like them!

• Video Game Artwork
• ThinkPad Setups
• Scam Numbers

We've also had MaddieTian kindly take over the Playstation community - please check it out and subscribe if you haven't already!

---

Server Updates

Since the January update, we've applied Lemmy updates 0.19.2 and 0.19.3 which fixed the previous federation bug. All servers on 0.19.3 upwards should have much more reliable federation now.

We've somewhat stabilized the site now too, with thanks to locuester - we've further tuned the database performance, and in the last week we've made some configuration changes to Lemmy's database (such as a memory leak fix), plus some further configuration changes to the operation of the server which has resulted in no more daily database restarts or the image processing software breaking every day. This is likely a bit of a stop gap until the Lemmy Devs formalize the move to Postgres 16 and the testing can prove that this improves performance. But it is one less thing to worry about for now!

On the topic of images, we've now doubled the image upload size from 1mb to 2mb quietly to see if this would have impact in day to day performance or storage. With the improvements to Pictrs (the software the serves and stores images) we've actually freed up lots of space in the image storage bucket and so have room to play. Given that we've had no issues with image upload sizes at 2mb, I am considering doubling again to 4mb to see what (if any) impact that has on performance. We'd love to allow high quality image uploads so we'll continue to work towards that.

We've also updated our Code of Conduct just a tiny little bit to cover more around downvote manipulation. Downvoting bad content is fine, downvoting all content in a community that you've never interacted with before and is in-line with the rules of that community is not fine. Remember, you can always report things you don't like and mods/admins can take action.

We'll also be tightening some of the rules up around interactions in remote communities - if we're receiving mass reports regarding a Lemmy.zip user's conduct in another community, we'll consider if that user is breaking the rules of that community and take action ourselves. We'll post more about that when those changes are finalized.

Remember, you can see all of our legal stuff at legal.lemmy.zip if you're every really really bored.

Finally, we'll be releasing a new survey soon so we gather feedback from you all as to how you find your Lemmy experience and we can do better.

We did this back when the instance was 3 month's old, so I feel now would be a good time to see what has changed and how we can continue to improve.

---

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

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

I just want to let everyone know that the easiest way you can support Lemmy.zip is to actively engage with content here: upvoting content you enjoy, sharing your thoughts through posts and comments, sparking meaningful discussions, or even creating new communities that resonate with your interests.

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.

If you want to support us in a different way than financially, then actively interacting with the instance helps us out loads.

---

Donations

I hate banging on about money and I'm not very good at it, but here is the general reminder that Lemmy.zip only exists because of the generous donations of its users.

We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

Therefore, my ask is that if you’ve been enjoying your time here, please consider a donation - it will help keep Lemmy.zip online and all donations go to paying for the server and for the surrounding services like image hosting and email. We have options for one-off donations of any amount, or recurring donations at set amounts.

We're starting to look at how we reward users with "perks" for donating, although I want to be very clear that this will never detract from the Lemmy experience.

So far we have the name in the thank you thread perk, and we're also introducing me.lemmy.zip - a place to keep links to various online identities (here's mine!) or links to anywhere really (as long they abide by our code of conduct obviously!). This is open to any past or present donator of any amount, just drop me a message and I'll set you up.

We're on the look out for good perks we can offer, so if you've seen any on other websites you think would be a good fit for here, let me know!

---

Graph time

Here's some exciting graphs on performance. This is slightly different this time, I'm now switching to grafana for all performance monitoring so graphs will come from there now.

CPU:

Memory:

This one requires some explanation - on the left you can see the spikes where the DB would max out RAM usage and restart itself, causing the site to break/slow down for a couple of minutes at a time.

On the right, you can see the implementation of all our changes, and how memory usage has steadied out.

Disk:

(The big jump on the right was due to swap being implemented)

Images:

The newest version of Pictrs has done some cleanup on images that haven't been accessed in a while, so the used space has dropped quite a bit.

Cloudflare

Overall stats:

Requests over 30 days:

Bandwidth over 30 days:

Unique visitors over 30 days:

And finally traffic per country over 30 days:

Thats all for this month - as always, if there are any other stats you'd like to see let me know! Otherwise, hope everyone has a great February.

Cheers,

Demigodrick