Demigodrick

As inspired by the bots on Reddit that respond to certain words, I've thrown together this code which allows anyone to set up their own response bot.

There is a bit more detail on Github, but in summary you can set your own trigger word and responses, and you have two modes of operation, "Exclude" which is the default and covers every community you're federated with (and allows moderators of a community to PM the bot to exclude it) and "Include", where you can pick a single community for the bot to be active in.

This is really early days and rough, but should work at the most basic level. Anyone who can provide some ideas/feedback/improvements - I'm totally open to them.

And to prove it works, I'm running Legolas Bot. Any comment you make below with the word "legolas" in will get a response (probably).

Small updates to reduce spaminess - will only reply to top level comments now.

Edit: Little updates include customisable polling rates and the ability to tag the comment creators name in a response.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11023519

Go to the original post if you have a question for the devs 🙂

This will take place ~24 hours from now. Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.

TimeZone Converter Link

This is a chance for any users, admins, or developers to ask anything they'd like to myself, @[email protected] , SleeplessOne , or @[email protected] about Lemmy, its future, and wider issues about the social media landscape today.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10449815

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

Yesterday we released Lemmy 0.19.2, which included various federation fixes, as well as a way for admins to view votes.

@phiresky fixed a federation loop bug, and worked on lemmy-federation-state, a tool to help visualize federation status.

@sleepless fixed a lemmy-ui theming issue, as well as an issue with lemmy-ui's error pages.

@dessalines fixed an issue with resolving reports, added the ability for admins to view votes to prevent downvote trolling, upgraded our woodpecker-ci to 2.1, and helped fix various CI issues, and is adding comment and post removing to jerboa.

@nutomic is fixing an issue with mastodon follows, working on local-only communities, fixed an issue with the lemmy-stats-crawler, fixed an issue with cache-control headers, better handling of federated reports from mastodon and kbin, and much more.

@dullbananas is fixing up some Lemmy DB triggers, adding a better-organized cursor-based pagination library, and a query plan viewer.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

Edit 2: Looks like this migration is going to take some time, so images may be down for a while. Apologies, there are about 1.7 million pics for it to get through so it may take a little while.

The rest of the update is completed and it looks like everything went smoothly.

~~Edit: 0.19.2 update completed, pictrs in progress of migrating so images probably will be not working for a bit.~~

Original:

Hi all,

With the release of lemmy 0.19.2 I'll update the site on Friday, along with the usual backend updates.

Downtime is expected to be very minimal, with any luck only a couple of seconds while the sever reboots.

I will also be updating Pictrs, the software that shows you images, so there will be a period of time where you can access Lemmy.zip but images might not load. It won't affect the functionality of Lemmy.zip short of not being able to view or upload images during this period.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Welcome to 2024! I hope everyone had a nice and enjoyable festive period, and I'm excited to see what the next 12 months holds for us all!

Here is the monthly update on everything happening with Lemmy.zip.

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New Communities

• LemmyTools
• Icebergs

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Server Updates

So quite a lot has happened since the December Update including the release of Lemmy 0.19 and 0.19.1, troubles with Lemmy federation across the network, a change to our hardware, and some moderator-friendly additions to Zippybot.

- Lemmy 0.19 Release

On the 16th December we took the server briefly offline in order to apply the 0.19 update, which took about 20 minutes to do some database migrations and then all came back online quite smoothly. We also took the opportunity to update the server OS and all of the supporting services to their latest versions too, which all in all took about 2 hours, most of which was waiting for various backups to complete. We have updated Pictrs (the software which shows you the images!) to its latest non-beta version, but there is a new update coming for Pictrs which requires some downtime to allow for prep work for this update to take place (although core Lemmy will still work). We'll post more on this when it happens.

It was quickly discovered we had quite a big issue (well, technically two but we worked through the second one which was caused by docker-specific settings which I'm happy to expand on if anyone is interested) which was that suddenly our CPU was maxing out, our RAM was maxing out, and our site was grinding to a halt. Something has changed, most likely due to the new persistent federation queue, which is causing the database to continuously eat server resources. Here's a lovely screenshot showing how the server was maxing out during my "wtf is happening" phase that I posted to our matrix chat:

Due to this, I've finally had to admit defeat and move us off a VPS to a Dedicated Server (technically dedicated vCPUs) which has kind of sorted our performance issues, by delaying the restart of the database from every hour and half to once a day.

This graph shows the before and after of our RAM usage. The left side shows the RAM being maxed out by the database and then the system killing and restarting the database in a vicious cycle (with our measly 8gb of RAM and the right hand side shows our new RAM usage - its still going up, but with 16GBs the cycle only occurs once a day, and for a second or two at most. Unfortunately this is a bug I can't fix, and isn't replicated by all Instances apparently (although I have seen a fair few other admins mention it) so hopefully it can be fixed at some point.

There is also a bug in relation to federation which due to all the DB restarts we weren't actually facing until we had a bit more power, when suddenly the server stopped federating with lots of other instances. There is a really handy public tool where you can see all this info live - It's important to note that the failing instances numbers are fine, if you try to visit them you'll probably get an error. The dead instances are instances our server hasn't been able to communicate with in 3 days, and so has stopped trying. Feel free to check that list and if you think any shouldn't be on there, let me know and I can manually reset them.

The issue lies with the "lagging" instances - we suddenly saw a thousand instances on that list, including some of the biggest instances, which indicated an issue. Its normal to see one or two on there, but not a thousand. Thankfully, a database restart does fix this issue so I am manually checking this website once or twice a day and will restart it if necessary, but if you do notice any issues ping me a message and I can take a look. In the future I pan to automate this but have not yet fully recovered from the festivities!

Lemmy 0.19.1 was also released, fixing some bugs such as the "show read posts" option not working, which was quietly applied.

- ZippyBot Moderator updates

Work continues to build some form of serviceable "automod" for moderators, so Zippy now includes the functionality for community mods to schedule posts to their communities, either on a one-off or ongoing basis.

The command for this is #autopost followed by some qualifiers - you can get the full info by sending Zippy a message with the command #autoposthelp, which will send you back something like this:

Updates will continue to happen to this for added functionality and I'm always open to ideas.

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Donations

This is probably a more important topic than it previously has been - due to the extreme generosity of some of our users, we've been in a financial position that has allowed us to not need to worry about funding too much. However, with the move from a VPS to a dedicated server, our costs have almost doubled from £16.36ish a month to £30 a month. This means, assuming nobody donated another penny, we'd run out of funds in less than 8 months. Our current level of donations is just short of this new monthly figure too, which does mean we will eventually run out of funds at some point too even if nothing changed with donations.

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.

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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.

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.

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Server Performance

Graph time!

CPU usage over last 30 days:

Disk usage over 30 days:

Network usage:

Image hosting stats: (over 200gb now!)

Cloudflare stats:

Deeper dive into those metrics:

And finally traffic stats from around the world:

As always, if there are any other metrics you'd like to see let me know!

Otherwise thats it for this month, thank you all for being here :)

Demigodrick

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9631322

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

Last Friday we finally released Lemmy 0.19.0, after a long development time and extensive bug fixing. Read the announcement to find out about the major changes. A few days later on Wednesday we had to publish 0.19.1 to fix a few more bugs that slipped through.

@phiresky fixed the critical bug with outgoing federation in 0.19. Previously he fixed an authentication bug in lemmy-ui which was blocking the 0.19 release.

@dessalines fixed the broken logic for "hide read posts". He also fixed a problem with email login being case sensitive

@nutomic reenabled pushing to crates.io so Rust developers can easily interact with Lemmy. He also made performance optimizations for /api/v3/site and the optimized the Activitypub context sent by Lemmy, reducing the database size and the amount of data sent between instances. He fixed various tests to prevent random failures in continuous integration 1 2

@dullbananas has long been busy improving the database queries for Lemmy, such as fixing a bug in the way different posts sorts are combined, and improving the test cases.

This is our last update for 2023. It was a very busy year for Lemmy, and it looks like 2024 might have even more changes in store. So lets enjoy these holidays, have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)