Hi all,

Time for a bit of maintenance on the server. Including updating the front-ends to their latest versions.

There will be a reboot or two, but downtime should be minimal. If any issues do crop up that affect the operation of the site, you can see the detail at status.lemmy.zip.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Edit: had to delay a little bit because of unexpected work commitments 🙄

Hey all,

Time for a bit of maintenance to the site, including updating all the frontends to their latest versions. There may be a small bit of downtime when the server is restarted, but shouldn't take too long.

Cheers,

Demigodrick

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/3740832 >turns out I did my math wrong, so it’s a little less than 30 days > > # July 12th, 2024 @ midnight EDT > > https://canvas.fediverse.events > > ✨ this year’s event also supports the entire fediverse not just Lemmy! > > (you have to be able to make/receive text posts, like mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed, etc) > (peertube accounts will not work) > > you can get update announcements on other fedi platforms with @canvas@fediverse.events link > > chat about Canvas on Matrix or Discord (they’re bridged)

With the release of Lemmy version 0.19.4 we'll look to upgrade ASAP (unless any issues pop up between now and then).

There is a DB upgrade so definitely going to be significant downtime during this window.

Please keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip during this time.

After much unexpected delay, the updates to the server have been completed. Apologies for the downtime!

---

Important edit: This is still ongoing, so the window is extended to 13:30 UTC. Sorry for the downtime. Please expect more downtime.

---

Time to update the server again. While I don't expect loads of downtime, there will be a 1 hour window where things might be offline. Please keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip if you're likely to be browsing the site during this time.

Some updates to the server to be applied, and may involve a quick server restart so you may lose to connection to the site if browsing during this time.

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.

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 @sunaurus@lemm.ee'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 @nutomic@lemmy.ml'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

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

It appears the upgrade to 0.19 was successful, which brings with it a host of improvements and upgrades.

The full list of changes is here. One issue that you may notice is that if you previously had 2FA set up, this will have been removed during the upgrade.

I would encourage everyone to set up 2FA now that the issues with it are fixed.

If you notice any issues, please drop me a message here or on matrix and I can look into it.

One change I've had to make is to remove the Voyager front end (v.lemmy.zip) - Voyager has it's own app in all app stores now, and maintenance of our own modified version of the front-end was becoming tricky. Apologies to anyone this affects.

Lemmy 0.19 has been released!

You can see the full changelog here

In order to apply this update, we'll be scheduling a 2 hour window starting 11:00AM UTC Saturday 16th December (I.e. tomorrow).

This will include at least one server restart, and as part of the upgrade process the database will probably be offline, so expect definite connection issues during this window. Lots of backing up will be done too.

I'll make another post when the window begins, and a further post when it is completed and we are happy everything is working.

Thanks

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!

Hello All,

Heads up that maintenance on the site will take place at 19:00 UTC on Saturday 30th.

This will include rebooting the server, so there will be definite downtime although we hope this will be to a minimum.

We'll also be applying the latest lemmy update 0.18.5 at the same time.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Looks to have gone smoothly - please check your favourite communities and let me know if there are any issues.

Hi All,

Just a heads up that at 12 noon tomorrow (about 16 hours from now) the site will temporarily be offline for a short period while we perform some maintenance and upgrade the performance of the server.

We'll keep the downtime as brief as possible, and you can keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip to see the progress.

We'll make another post when the updates are completed.

Thanks!

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,

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.

https://canvas.toast.ooo

The Canvas event has started. You can go there with the above link and sign in by entering your instance name (lemmy.zip if you're a user on this instance) and your username (no password entry is required).

After that you will receive a DM on Lemmy with a code that you can enter on the canvas site to confirm your identity. You might need to press 'Sign Up' afterwards on the main Canvas and it should show your username meaning you're good to go.

Quick rundown of the rules:

1 pixel per minute. Up to six stacked pixels. Notification and timer for upcoming pixels. No hateful/illegal/NSFL content is permitted.

Event runtime:

This event will last 72 hours, starting August 4th, 12:00AM EST (4:00AM UTC) and ending on August 6th, 11:59PM EST (3:59AM UTC)

• Matrix Space
• Lemmy Community

Hey everybody,

If you're interested in a Fediverse equivalent of a collaborative online canvas where each user gets to place 1 pixel every minute @grant@toast.ooo is running an event this coming weekend using Pxls.

This event will last 72 hours, starting August 4th, 12:00AM EST (4:00AM UTC) and ending on August 6th, 11:59PM EST (3:59AM UTC)

Here are the instances that are joining:

• toast.ooo
• lemmy.zip
• lemmy.ca

Join the Lemmy Community !canvas@toast.ooo

Join the Matrix Space #lemmy-canvas:matrix.org

Link to original post: https://lemmy.zip/post/888011

More info will follow before the start of the event!

Hi All,

Following diagnosis of issues we think the site has now succesfully upgraded to 0.18.3.

PLEASE check all of your favourite communities ASAP and let us know if there are any issues, so if we do need to roll back again we don't lose too much data.

I really appreciate everyone's patience with us with this, we hit an issue with the postgres database and have learned many lessons from this experience!

Please note, mobile/beta/front end sites might not be updated yet. I've pulled all the latest updates now but if there are any errors hopefully they'll be fixed soon.

Due to a corrupted database following the upgrade we've needed to roll back to a point before the upgrade happened.

I'm really sorry about this, but we've had to take this step so we can continue to properly run the site.

Anything added to the site in the last 12 hours will have been wiped, i.e. posts, communities. We're looking at ways to make sure this doesn't happen in future.

Happy to answer any questions below.

Hey everyone, we've made a new theme for our instance. It's set as the default instance theme at the moment so if the theme setting in your profile is set to 'Browser Default' then you should already be seeing it.

Folded is a theme based on another custom theme, Lemonberry, which made things a lot easier to figure out so shout out to thayer@lemmy.ca for the base theme.

It's currently only a 'dark mode' and hasn't had much testing so please let us know if you see any glaring issues that we missed. Also, constructive criticism is more than welcome with this being a first attempt.

Also, if you wish to opt out of this theme all you need to do is click on your username on the top right -> Settings -> Theme and select a different one. The old instance default should be 'darkly' if you just want to revert to that.

Otherwise, you can set it to 'folded-v4' or 'Browser Default' to check out the new theme.

Here are some pics of the theme:

!

!

Hope you like it

!

Edit: RC version of lemmy-ui has been released to fix this issue for emojis, which has been applied to lemmy.zip.

Hello all,

Around 5 hours ago Lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone experienced a "hack" targeting admin accounts, which then altered the sites and spread spam etc.

Thankfully the attack vector was figured out quite quickly and mitigations were put in place. Sami was very quick to act and defederated us from those instances to prevent their exploit spilling over into our site.

The attack vector is custom emojis, which allowed attackers to exploit weaknesses via cross site scripting. More info is available here for those interested: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1895

This attack gives attackers access to your "session". They won't know your password as they did not have access to the database or the server. Attackers would have had access to your user settings page, so they could potentially see your email address.

Lemmy.zip had a custom emoji in place from testing a few weeks ago, so as an extra precaution we've reset the secrets table in the database which should have logged everyone out (sorry!). This would prevent attackers still having access to any accounts on our site.

Its important to add that at this stage I don't believe any of our users have been compromised, due to Sami's quick action to defederate and remove the custom emoji once this was known as the attack vector. No accounts on this instance were involved in the posting of spam and none of our admin accounts were compromised either.

If we find out any more information we'll add it here. We'll continue to implement all security fixes as they become available.

Defederating from Lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone until they have their shit back together as they seem to have been compromised (extent is not fully known at the moment). Beehaw took their servers down preemptively too.

Rogue admin accounts can do harm to other instances too this is a precautionary measure until we have a better idea of what we're dealing with.

Reminder not to click on sketchy links!

Should be down for a short time while the update is applied.

You may need to do a hard refresh on your browser to refresh your cache - Shift + F5 on chromium browsers, Ctrl + F5 on Firefox.

As always you can check status.lemmy.zip for updates if you can't access the site.

Just a heads up that the latest version of the Lemmy server has been released. I'll be applying the update shortly. I don't expect too many issues but you might lose connection temporarily.

Edit: Honest to god pictures are broken again. FFS. I know what the issue is though, it lies with the change in the internal nginx proxy method - attempting a fix now> BE

Edit 2: images are back, more info here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/96

Originally I was trying to put Lemmy.zip behind a CDN (cloudflare) to reduce costs, however suddenly images stopped loading. Cue mild panic attack.

You may notice that there are no images on the local instances.

Turns out this is because Backblaze has gone down, who host all our storage.

https://status.backblaze.com/

When they come back up, pictures should automatically load again.

(I'm using us-east for image storage and this is the server thats gone down while the others still work, talk about bad luck!)

Hello All,

So today a few Lemmy instances have been hit by a spam bot. We had 80 new accounts created in a matter of minutes, but thankfully due to email verification being required, none have been able to actually complete the sign up process.

Because of this, I've had to enable further measures to ensure sign ups are real people. Anyone signing up will now need to explain that they're human AND verify their email address. This seems to have stopped the bots for now.

Because manual approval is required for each account, I'm looking to appoint a community member to help moderate and admin the instance.

If you're interested, please send me a message (click on my profile and click send message) and give me a quick.overview of yourself and why you want to admin the instance.

To be eligible you must:

• be a member of Lemmy.zip
• account must be suitably old (minimum 3 days)
• must be active on Lemmy

If you think this is something you'd be interested in then please send me a message.

On the eve on Lemmy.zip turning one week old, and following requests from members of the community, I'm putting together a post to show how Lemmy.zip is being run, the resources taken up in the back-end and the general day to day issues I've come across and resolved.

Hardware

Firstly, the setting up of Lemmy.zip.\ Lemmy.zip (the domain) was purchased on Google Domains (apparently now sold off to squarespace?), and I have the domain for two years.

Secondly, the cloud platform is Hetzner Cloud. The server is based in Falkenstein, Germany. The server "name" is CX21 - Its an intel CPU, with 2x vcpus, 4GB of RAM, a 40GB SSD and 20TB of outgoing traffic.

After setting up SSH, I followed the Ansible guide to set up Lemmy, which got the instance set up pretty much instantly. Great success.. or so I thought!

Setup

The first thing I did was try federating with some other instances, which appeared to work straight away. Great. I tried some of the settings, added a logo, turned on user registration and email validation, added a site bio etc. Then I tried logging in and out. Oh no. I couldn't log back in with the Admin account, because email verification was turned on and I hadn't verified my email! Now, I know how to fix this via SQL commands, but at the time I had no clue. I also wasn't receiving any emails from Lemmy.zip. After some googling, it turns out Hetzner blocks port 25, which is the default postfix port (postfix is the piece of software that handles emails). So now I was locked out with seemingly no way to get back in. Whoops. So I went and deleted the server and started from scratch. I reinstalled Lemmy, set up the instance again and made sure email verification was off this time. I posted in a few places about the server, and suddenly people were joining!

The next step was to get email working. I did try SendGrid for emails first, who immediately refused to verify me and still, a week later, have not replied to my support request.

Next I tried Mailersend, who had quite a complex validation but did finally approve me. Then I had to figure out how to get the server to send emails using the Mailersend details.

After a couple of hours of testing, it turns out you only need to add the details to the lemmy config.hjson file, and you don't need to alter anything in the postfix container. I re-uploaded Lemmy, set email validation to true, and created a test account - boom! Email received.

For the most part, that was the first 24 hours done. I think by the end of the first day we had ~20 users, which I was really excited about.

Stats

As I'm typing this, we have 369 (nice) users, which is incredible. At one point, we even made it onto the recommended servers list however we've since been knocked off the list due to the uptime dropping after I've had to restart the server a few times. Still, another moment I was really proud of.

Most of the week has been quite smooth in all honesty, until today when I had a few reports that users couldn't register or log in to their accounts. It took quite a while to track down the issue, as the logs were not really giving anything away. Finally, I saw a line in the log which said api_routes_websocket: email_send_failed: Connection error: timed out (this literally took me 3 hours to find this one line - tip, set logging level to warn and not the default info if you want any chance of finding errors in a busy instance!)

With a bit of googling, I was able to check my connection to the Mailersend smtp server and noticed that the telnet connection was timing out, which indicates that port 587 is being blocked somewhere in the chain. I have emailed Mailersend support but being a Saturday i'm not expecting a response for a while.

!telnet error

Before Mailersend stopped working, here is what the email stats look like:

!

You can see the expected tail off as Reddit opened back up, but then you can see emails drop to 0.

So with some frantic googling, I've switched (hopefully temporarily) to another provider, and emails are working again. Phew.

In terms of server performance, have some fancy graphs:

! Server performance over the last week. The three big spikes relate to me doing something intensive on the server, rather than anything Lemmy is doing. Usage is mostly around 50% which is great, and gives us lots of growing room still.

Here are some other graphs to look at:

! Live server usage as I'm writing this

! Live network usage

Storage space used:\ !\ Storage used out of the 40gb - 36% used. There was an issue with the pictrs container (the software that uploads/manages photos) writing a log that was about 7gb in size before I noticed. That has been fixed with a rotating log file rather than one big file.

Other stuff

Thought I'd add some stuff I've liked from the last week. Firstly, if you haven't already subscribed to the Starfield community and have an interest in the game, I urge you to do so.

A community I've quite enjoyed too is Dad jokes - definitely worth checking out if you want a laugh.

End

Hopefully thats been interesting for people - if there is anything you'd like to see more on, let me know. Happy to add more detail (where I can!)

Anyone is welcome to send me a message on here, I have no issues talking more privately. I have also set up an email address (lemmy.zip@proton.me) for anyone who is locked out of an account or needs to share personal details and isn't comfortable using this platform to do so.

Edit: appears to be fixed.

Lemmy.zip may be up and down all day - emails have stopped working (no discernible reason why) and so registrations are closed, but you should be able to login without having a registered email to stop current users from being locked out. I'll update when I know further information.

Edit: for anyone that is interested, I can't telnet port 587 on the mail sending platform. I can do it fine for other smtp providers so I assume it is a current provider issue. I'm looking at switching providers to see if this helps.

Edit 2: I've switched email providers and it appears we're back up and running again - email resets appear to work. I'll switch email verifcation back on and allow new users.

If anyone is having any issues, please email me at lemmy.zip@proton.me if you can't access your account, and I will look into it.

Welcome!

Welcome to Lemmy.zip

About Lemmy

Lemmy is a federated social link aggregation and discussion platform. It’s being developed by the Lemmy devs

About Federation

What does federation mean?

It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact with each other.

• You can search and view communities on remote servers from here
• You can create posts in remote communities
• You can respond to remote posts
• You will be notified (if you wish) of comments on your remote posts
• You can follow Lemmy users/communities on other platforms that also use the Activitypub protocol like Mastodon
• Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.

About Lemmy.zip

Lemmy.zip is a Lemmy server aimed at welcoming all and providing a space for all types of topics and discussions, with maybe a slant towards technology and all things related. We are one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software.

Quick Start Guide

- Feed

Your feed may look relatively empty when you first join, with just the Lemmy.zip posts available. This is because by default your view is set to "Local". You can use the options at the top of your feed to see more posts.

• "Subscribed" will show you the communities you have subscribed to.
• "Local" will show just posts from communities that are local to Lemmy.zip.
• "All" will show posts from all communities that have been subscribed to by members of Lemmy.zip from across all servers.

You can also sort your feed by different options, such as "Active", "Hot", and "New".

I fully recommend "Hot" for a good turnover of posts in your feed.

You can set the default Sort and Type in your user settings to your taste.

• If you can't see your own posts in the feed, go to your settings and make sure Show Read Posts is turned ON!

- NSFW

We are now a NSFW enabled instance, which means there may be NSFW content in the Local and All categories if you leave NSFW enabled in your account. If you do not wish to view NSFW content make sure you toggle off Show NSFW content under your Settings.

Another option is to select “Block Community” from the sidebar, when on the specific community. Once you have done that you will never see it again!

- Searching

In the top menu, you’ll see the search icon. There, you can search for posts, communities etc. You can just enter a search-word and it will find the Post-titles, post-content, communities etc containing that word that the server knows of. So any content any user of this server ever interacted with.

You can also search for a community by it’s link, e.g. !lemmy@lemmy.ml or its URL, e.g. https://lemmy@lemmy.ml. Even if the server hasn’t ever seen that community, it will look it up remotely. Sometimes it takes some time for it to fetch the info (and displays ‘No results’ meanwhile…) so just be patient and search a second time after a few seconds. Please note search time may be increase if remote servers are experiencing high loads.

For a more in depth list of remote communities, you can visit browse.feddit.de or Lemmyverse search. From there you can copy your chosen communities URL and search for it in Lemmy.zip.

- Communities

You can subscribe to any community on another server and post/comment on that server, all from this instance. Once you've subscribed, this server will continue to pull the latest content from that community through to here.

The subscribe button is on the top right of the community. Click this will federate Lemmy.zip with that community.

You can create a community on this server too (there is no restriction on creating communities on Lemmy.zip, unlike some other instances) and anyone else will be able to subscribe to your community.

You can see all of the instances we've federated with by going here or clicking instances in the footer of the webpage.

Creating a community? Once you've created your community, you can advertise it via a couple of different communities dedicated to sharing new communties.

• New Communities

There is no problem with having similar communities across instances, as each can host its own discussions, but it may be a good idea to search for a community before creating it as you may find a group that has already done some of the legwork for you.

While this instance is primarily focussed around game and tech related communities, please don't feel restricted to that. Any topic is fine (and encouraged!) as long as it adheres to the general instance rules.

On Lemmy.zip, anyone can create a Community and become its moderator by default. It takes very little effort to create but requires a little bit of commitment to looking after it. You can always choose to remove yourself as moderator (and ideally hand it off to someone else) or delete it completely if needed.

- Funding

Lemmy.zip will never run ads, sell user data, or generate income in a way that isn't clear and agreed by the community.

Therefore if you're enjoying using Lemmy.zip please consider a small donation to help us keep going for the longer term.

You can find out more information or see who has been kind enough to donate by clicking here!

- Moderating

The Admins for Lemmy.zip are as follows:

• Demigodrick
• Sami

You can see mod actions via the this link or by clicking modlog at the bottom of the page.

- Mobile Applications

We have a dedicated mobile/tablet site for those who don't want to download an app. This is a webapp and can be saved to your phone's home screen for easy access.

You can navigate to this site by going to m.lemmy.zip

If you'd prefer a native app, a full list of apps for every platform can be found by clicking here.

An alternative website is also here, where you can filter by platform or type: https://lemmyapps.netlify.app

These should all work with Lemmy.zip without any issues.

- Joining Lemmy.zip

Currently there are no restrictions on joining this server. Anyone is free to join as long as they continue to follow the rules in the sidebar.

Please interact with Lemmy after you've joined. The more interactions, the better Lemmy will be (plus, it helps out Lemmy.zip too!)

- Help or Support

If you ever feel you need help or support while on Lemmy.zip, or you've seen something that isn't right or makes you feel uncomfortable, you can send Sami or Demigodrick a message and we will confidentially help. We both have secure messaging links in our profile if you'd rather message with encryption, or you can send an email to hello@lemmy.zip and we'll respond that way. We're always here to help.

- Thank you!

Thank you for joining Lemmy.zip. Please remember, the most important thing is that you enjoy yourself!