Hello everybody, It's time for a update on feddit.uk. This time, it's good news, and stability.

I'll keep things concise, then elaborate later in the post for curious people:

• feddit.uk has been stabilised, and we have access to everything we need to move forward with it.
• The new domain name will not be used as the main instance, feddit.uk will remain the domain.
• Emperor and myself are responsible for instance and domain respectively.
• The domain has been transferred to me.
• We will be working with Tom to transfer the instance to new hosting under Emperor.
• The instance is currently running at capacity, which requires manual intervention every so often. This will be permanently resolved once the server is migrated.
• Images may be disabled while the system is prepared for migration, other services should be working ________________________________

"What went wrong?" "Why has conflicting information been showing up at times?" ________________________________

The honest answer is, for the last few months, there have been two paths forward. These plans were constantly being updated, and the needle swung between viability for Plan A, and Plan B, often at the last moment.

At first, when Tom wasn't able to respond: Plan A, new Admins added, new admins carry on the work. Plan B, new site made, Emperor and I splitting responsibilities to make sure we had a bus factor >1.

As time went on, we started down the Plan B. Lots of long discussion over names, discussing with community members, registering domains, and getting back-ends set up. I was battling ansible setup, when suddenly, we had admin, and swung back to Plan A.

Things calmed down a little, but we were still lacking back-end, and needed to discuss how things would work long term. Eventually, we started having to make A/B plans again: Plan A, start doing back-end work, and work out long-term plans. Plan B, build a new site.

It all came to a bit of a head on Christmas (when doesn't it? Never agree to do on-call over the holidays, folks) feddit.uk was down, Emperor and I still didn't have back-end.

So Plan B started again. I put on Bridget Jones Diary, in the hope that my partner wouldn't notice I was about to spend two hours trying to build a new lemmy instance from scratch. (Don't ever do this. They knew. I still need to make it up to them.) And it was just about working. But Emperor was unwell, and I felt it would not be a good idea launching with half the team unavailable.

A few days later, Emperor is back in business. Great, lets continue with Plan B. And I recieve a message that we're getting back-end access. Plan A time. The needle swings again. ________________________________ So that's where we are now. Plan A. Everything is now in place. feddit.uk stays up, and we work on it. ________________________________

Questions that might come up:

"When are you going to a new host?" Once Emperor and I have had time to run through the process, and schedule a day to make the change over. When we have set a date, we will communicate it.

"When are we going to 19.2 (or higher)?" The aim was to perform the upgrade after the site was migrated. This morning, the site was upgraded, and we are dealing with a few of the impacts of this. (Tom has been very busy, and we're very thankful!)

"What about email verification? Email should now be going out correctly. We may go through the list of accounts that have not been validated, and re-send the email verification.

Who is "Teasmade?" Teasmade is the face of site processes. Validations, password resets. If you message admins, you may get a response from them. They may end up with a backstory and personality down the line.

"I like/don't like the name Teasmade" We'll happily hear alternative suggestions.

"Why didn't you continue with migrating to a new site?" Because even with full migrations, we would never be able to move everything. Now that we're able to improve feddit.uk, we aim to achieve a lot of the same goals, while keeping existing communities intact.

"Who is running things?" Currently, it's a combination of Tom, Emperor, and GreatAlbatross (me). Tom may stay on as an admin post-migration.

"What happens if one of you disappears?" Our overall role definitions are based on responsibility, realistically we could function on just one until new admins could be recruited.

"What is happening on the technical side at the moment? Can I be involved?" Once the system is on a new host, I will do some writing up, and we will consider people for back-end access. Until things are more settled, and we have change-control in place, we're keeping configuration simple. There will definitely be talk about the technical issues encountered, as people may find it interesting. In the meantime, if there are reasonable features you would like to see, and you're happy to send us documentation, we'll absolutely look into them.

"How can I contact someone outside of the Lemmy instance?" We have a Matrix channel (run by emperor). For general queries, you can email teasmade at the domain (just trying to keep spam down a little). And we have general complaince addresses (abuse/trouble).

"I wanted to sign up, but I couldn't/the email didn't arrive" If you email Teasmade, we can sort it. We do have to do this manually, but we're happy to do so.

Other questions?

Pop a reply in, we'll do our best to reply.

Emperor, Tom, and GreatAlbatross.

Welcome to this months financial report.

Everything is still ticking along nicely, so I'll make this short and sweet. If there's something else you want to know about all this then feel free to ask in the comments.

As can be seen from our graph on Open Collective we got £43.76 in and spent £49.99:

!

However, that's not the complete picture - the various outgoings are listed in the spreadsheet but to break it down further:

Hosting remains unchanged (total after VAT €40.68 - £34.74):

• Server - €29.00
• IP4 - €1.70
• Backup box - €3.20

In addition I've been reimbursed £10.57 for earlier hosting payments. This is the penultimate one of these. So, after next month the contributions will cover the outgoings.

Since Tom handed over the instance, we've largely been focused on ensuring the site is working properly and that the bills get paid. This is now all working smoothly and, as a thank you for sticking with us and generously supporting the instance, we've been working on a few things. First up, we've added new frontends. We're looking into other changes and hope to also add some perks for contributors too. With the latter in mind, I will be working through everyone who has donated and linking them to their feddit.uk usernames. If your's isn't obvious then contact me either here or on Matrix (the secure message button in my profile).

Previous reports:

• July 2024

Happy to announce we've finally setup some alternative frontends.

• https://p.feddit.uk (photon)
• https://a.feddit.uk (alexanderite)
• https://old.feddit.uk (mlmym)

Photon might be flaky, we're on a release candidate because of issue I was running into using it in Firefox. It's also what I'm using to write this. If you notice any issues, feel free to let us know.

I've posted the same thing twice to !raining@sh.itjust.works and it doesn't federate back.

I posted it again from my lemmings.world account and itjust.works 😉.

I can't see the instances on either block list, is there a problem here or is automod striking again? (btw, I still have problems with large posts not coming through from !lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com)

As can be seen from our Open Collective page, we built up a war chest in our first round of fundraising that almost covers a year's worth of hosting and we still have solid monthly donations:

!

However, this doesn't provide a full breakdown of our costs, so here are the details:

Hosting (total after VAT €40.68 - £34.09):

• Server - €29.00
• IP4 - €1.70
• Backup box - €3.20

So, as we received £39.31 this month our monthly donations are covering the hosting costs. As we went for a server with ample specifications these costs should remain the same for the time being.

In addition, before our fund-raiskng, I paid for hosting as we were preparing for a move to a new instance and then, after a quick change of plans, the current server. So there were four payments and I am submitting one repayment each month. This month was £11.78.

Following an earlier request, I have broken down the outgoings in a spreadsheet, which can be found here. That should help explain what the various costs have been and the payments that have been made to me as well as the ones due.

If anyone has any other questions then fire away. I've tried to keep everything concise but informative, however, I may have missed something.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to ask if there is any reason why UK_Politics on Feddit has substantially less content compared to UK_Politics on Reddit?

I'd love to only use Feddit but I find myself starting with Feddit and reading the stories/articles quickly and then checking Reddit to see other content. This annoys me (and maybe many others) as I would love to get completely away from Reddit.

Is it purely down to less people on Feddit vs Reddit? or some other reason?

Is there any way we could 'sync' with Reddit to get the same content? I'm not bothered with the discussion parts of it I'd just like to get the stories and articles (which would hopefully add more discussion on Feddit if we got them)

I'm still getting some federation weirdness, but this issue seems to be to do with general federation rather than particular actions.

This community: https://feddit.uk/c/lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Refuses to update! Some posts have been edited but the edits don't come through. New posts are added but the only way I can get them to come through to feddit.uk is to search for the full original URL.

Is there an issue here? Or is it just being very slow?

As GA was just breaking things, I was staring at the rather bare bones Bad Gateway error page and thought: we really need custom error pages. My favourite example is IMDb that uses movie quotes, but there are many others, and we could definitely make ours distinctly British. So I am opening the floor to suggestions - perhaps a slice of UK life ("popped down the shop for more beans", we may be able to get a maintenance page in, so something like road works) or some Carry On sauce ("Oo missus, the server has gone down on you, no extra charge") or Pythonesque or... something else. People won't see them often but it should, hopefully, get a smile when it does all go tits up (which sounds like something we could use).

Common errors:

• 400 - Bad Request
• 401 - Unauthorised
• 403 - Forbidden
• 404 - Not Found
• 500 - Internal Server Error
• 502 - Bad Gateway

Or if.you have a good idea for a rare one, or you have a personal favourite error code that's not being catered for, then ask and we can add it to the list.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13627155

> We're going to try to make the leap forward today. > There will be some downtime while we attempt to do this. > Rollback will be around 3pm if things are not working as expected.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13242302

> Hello, > I'm hoping to take the instance to 19.4 in the near future. > Before doing this, I need to take pictrs up a few versions. > This will take a while, so while 19.4 is in the works, it won't happen for a week or so. > > Cheers, > GA.

Today marks the one year anniversary of our humble little instance. It's been an eventful year but, despite fate's best efforts, we're still here. So go us! (or boo us if you think we suck)

I felt this might be worth the community discussing. Happy for people both on and off-instance to weigh in, though it is about this instance's interaction.

It's made doubly fun by the fact that the main owners of the lemmy project are admins on there. (If I understand correctly)

Title was brought over during the cross post.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531

> I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ... > > As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support. > > I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place. > > This is what the modlog of the instance looks like: > > ! > > Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say? > > When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in. > > Proof: > > ! > > So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance." > > The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with. > > I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

Hi I was looking though defend.xyz at eviltoast, notices they had few defeds but Lemmy.ml, feddit.de and UK are in the small list, just wondering why?

When GreatAlbatross and I agreed to become Admins our guiding principle was that this couldn't be a project run and funded by an individual and subjects to their waxing and waning interest. Instead, this had to be a social network run by and for the users. That meant that we needed as much as possible to be open and transparent with no single point of failure. This should ensure that feddit.uk would be around as long as people needed it, possibly even outlasting the both of us.

To this end, now the server move has been competed, we move on to the next step in securing the instance's future - ensuring there are enough funds coming in to cover the cost of running the site.

Fortunately, the outgoings are pretty modest (£40/month) and so it will only take a few dozen people contributing a small amount each month to pay for everything.

With the ideas of openness and transparency in mind, and after listening to suggests from you, we have signed up with Open Collective. As we are using a fiscal host it doesn't require any donated money to be held in a personal bank account, all banking and accounts are done by them (in return for a set-up fee and 5%) and the state of the finances can be viewed on the Open Collective website.

As well as a custom option (where you can pay what you like when you like), we have set a few contribution tiers:

• Regular subscription of £1 or £5 a month
• One-off donations of £5 or £10

This should meet the regular costs and, hopefully, build up enough of a surplus to increase storage as needed or upgrade the hosting if there is a sudden influx of Reddit refugees again. GA and I have also been funding things from our own pocket up to this point and, when there is enough of a war chest built up, we will repay those costs.

There will be regular updates (probably around this time every month as the invoice for the server goes out on the 4th and regular contributions are collected on the 1st) where we'll explain the costs and summarise the fundraising efforts so far.

If anyone has any questions feel free to ask below.

Good to see this instance is back up

Last year I asked for assistance with account recovery, I enabled 2fa by mistake, instantly disabled it but alas I was met with the 2fa prompt after attempting to log back in. At the time this instance wasn't being maintain and I didn't get assistance or comment when I originally asked for help so now that this instance is active I am asking again.

If its irretrievably then no worries but if I could regain access then that would be awesome

User: squid.feddit I can give other information to the instance maintainer.

We're currently getting hit by the wave of spam doing the rounds on the Fediverse. If you want a bit of background see this but be warned, it's annoyingly stupid.

At the moment it's only hitting one community on here: !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk

So from time to time while we work on a solution, we'll shut that community to new posts if we don't have anyone on hand to deal with the spam or we need time to clear the backlog or overnight.

It's currently closed at the moment.

If anyone has a news story burning a hole in their pocket that must be posted there then drop it in here and one of the Admins will post it. Comments should be unaffected, so discussion can carry on.

Has anyone else noticed that in the TV advert for 'On The Beach' holidays, Paddy McGuinness appears to say 'Fooking geniuses'?

Now that I've heard it, I can't unhear it.

I won't pin this one, as it should be relatively minor. A couple of tweaks under the bonnet to apply, and possibly advancing to 0.19.3 if there is time.

Hello from sunny England! How was your morning?

We have a few updates on how things are running, and things coming down the pipe.

How things are running:

Migration to the new server

We are pleased to announce that this is now complete.

• Everything is now a little calmer, and hopefully a little faster too.
• Tom has been able to switch off the old server, and no longer has to pay for it, which I'm sure he's very happy about.
• I still need to knit in a few days worth of missing images. It's a single command, but it deserves a time when I can give it full focus.
• We have more CSAM protection
• Custom interfaces for the site have not been migrated, as we wanted to rebuild them from scratch.
• Due to the storage ballooning, sensible restrictions on images are now in place.
• Email encountered a few hiccups, but should now be delivering password resets and verifications.

As always, if there are any other issues noted, drop us a line. Either in this community, on the matrix channel, or by messaging myself or Emperor. I would also like to take this chance to thank flamingos-cant for their hard work behind the scenes!

What's coming next:

Financials and donations

We know people have been keen to support the community for a while, and we're pleased to announce...that we're aiming to announce it later this week. We did not want to remove Tom's link until he was able to pull the plug on the old server. That is now done. We'll go into more detail later this week, but we're looking to offer both regular and one-off contributions, and lots of clarity as to how the money is used.

More moderators

We are keen for popular communities to have more than one moderator. This is absolutely not a requirement. Mods, if you would like new people, pop a post on the community, or message us for ideas. Community members, if you think you could help, message the community mods.

Slurs and profanity

The best part of any moderators day: Wading through reported and unreported posts, then trying to work out what is and isn't ok. Especially since certain words are and aren't acceptable depending on context, or intent of the poster.

We're considering a 3 tier system. Yes, Maybe, No.

Yes: Probably 99% of the English language. Also includes non-discriminatory expletives. Things you might say after banging your shin. The slur filter will not limit these words, and we will not be using autodetection.

Maybe: Words that are maybe OK, depending on context/intent. The slur filter will not block these words, but use of a word will trigger a flag for review of the post/account.

No: Slur filter will just remove.

We'll discuss this further in the future, if you would like to chat about it here, try to keep it to one thread :)

A few upgrades behind the scenes

We'll be scheduling some downtime in the near future to upgrade the picture serving system, hopefully adding a few extra interfaces (old.feddit.uk, anyone?)

As always, any questions, suggestions, pop them in a reply to this post.

Cheers, GreatAlbatross.

What's happening?

feddit.uk will be down for maintainence between 19:00 and 21:00 UTC (GMT in old money) on Saturday the 27th of January.

We are aiming to move the site between hosts, and restore missing images.

How long do you expect it to take?

The target time is 1 hour. The window is 2 hours. That's enough time for about 1 season of Peep Show, if you're bored.

What is the rollback plan?

If we're not happy with things by 20:30, we will bring the site up in it's previous state, and schedule a longer window in the future. We'll let you know if/when the decision is made.

Where can I see status updates?

We have a public channel on Matrix for people who wish to keep up with the status. It's part of the feddit.uk Matrix space which is there as a fallback in case of any downtime and to provide end-to-end encrypted communication where required.

edit: there is now a WhatsApp channel.

Why are you doing this?

As previously discussed in here, it's been quite the journey but, in summary: Tom, who set up the instance and was the only Admin, went AWOL. GreatAlbatross and I contacted him offering to take over and Tom made us Admins but we didn't have any access to the server, so we were limited in what we could do.

The situation got increasingly problematic and plans were drawn up to take over the whole running of the site or to start a new one from scratch. It took a while but just as we were about to pull the trigger on the new instance Tom gave us access. GA is now in charge of the domain and I have overall responsibility for the new server.

The site has been suffering outages because the size of the image folders ate up all the available space and Tom removed the first image folder (why various graphics are still missing). That made moving the site to a new hosting plan more urgent and we've been working away in the background to get to the point that we were in a position to start the process. Hence the downtime.

We'd like to thank everyone for their patience and enthusiasm - it has helped carry us through what hasn't been a straightforward process.

I have more questions

There will be more information after the move about how we are going to move forward with feddit.uk to ensure it will thrive for as long as people want it. However, if there's anything that is unclear about current events then fire away in the comments below.

When I "delete" a comment, all it does is replace the text with "deleted by creator". It doesn't even hide my username. This is different from previous behaviour where the comment was entirely removed from the public view.

I should be in control of my comment. If I want to delete it then it should be entirely removed - at least from the public view. I don't want to make comments knowing that I'm permenantly etching my username into the stone of the thread forever with no ability to delete it. I'm highly put off from engaging now that I can't reliably delete what I write.

Being able to undo the deletion is fine but the undo really should only last 1h or maybe 24h before the comment is properly deleted.

Is it just me and my Lemmy client (Jerboa) or have a bunch of community icons / logos gone missing? I'm seeing a blank logo for a few communities.

• UK memes
• Ask UK
• British Telly
• And a bunch more

But it's not all of the communities 🤔?

• Feddit UK
• Electric vehicle
• And a bunch more seem to be fine.

Not sure what exactly is causing this but when I browse to !formula1@lemmy.world on feddit.uk there's two pinned posts from a while ago, but they can't be seen when visited from lemmy.world

https://feddit.uk/c/formula1@lemmy.world

https://lemmy.world/c/formula1

I'm unsure where this problem originates, but my guess would be the instance as it's consistent no matter where I try to post (local or external communities).

Whenever I try to attach an image to a post, I'm getting the following error:

{"data":{"msg":"Error in DB","files":null},"state":"success"}

Does anyone more knowledgeable about these sort of things have any clue what that's about?

Is it possible to upgrade feddit.uk to the latest release of Lemmy so that we can make use of this patch to export user account data?

So it’s been five months since @tom@feddit.uk last posted and two months since he contacted @emperor@feddit.uk

It’s seems like nothing much has happened and the plans for a replacement were briefly resurrected then shutdown.

I guess we’ve all moved on.

Was feddit.uk down for a while yesterday

I think I know the answer to this but just wanted to check incase it was something else. I'm trying to subscribe to some new communities and can't.

For example: https://feddit.uk/c/eurovision@feddit.de returns the error message:

The server returned this error: couldnt_find_community.

I think it is to do with the 0.19 Lemmy instance upgrade (and the fact that we haven't upgraded yet) but can't confirm that.

Is that correct or is it something else? 🍻

Edit: Ok this is quite embarrassing. The moment I made this post I was able to access the community and subscribe. I swear this wasn't working a few hours ago and right before I made the post.... honest 😄. I'll leave this post up incase there's a better explanation in the comments.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/4927687

> cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9347983 > > > ## What is Lemmy? > > > > Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top. > > > > ## Major Changes > > > > This release is very large with almost 400 commits since 0.18.5. As such we can only give a general overview of the major changes in this post, and without going into detail. For more information, read the full changelog and linked issues at the bottom of this post. > > > > ### Improved Post Ranking > > > > There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy's sorts are detailed here. > > > > ### Instance Blocks for Users > > > > Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn't affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities. > > > > ### Two-Factor-Auth Rework > > > > Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again. > > > > ### New Federation Queue > > > > Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don't get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance. > > > > ### Remote Follow > > > > Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don't have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works. > > > > ### Authentication via Header or Cookie > > > > Previous Lemmy versions used to send authentication tokens as part of the parameters. This was a leftover from websocket, which doesn't have any separate fields for this purpose. Now that we are using HTTP, authentication can finally be passed via jwt cookie or via header Authorization: Bearer . The old authentication method is not supported anymore to simplify maintenance. A major benefit of this change is that Lemmy can now send cache-control headers depending on authentication state. API responses with login have cache-control: private, those without have cache-control: public, max-age=60. This means that responses can be cached in Nginx which reduces server load. > > > > ### Moderation > > > > Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API. > > > > ### Cursor based pagination > > > > 0.19 adds support for cursor based pagination on the /api/v3/post/list endpoint. This is more efficient for the database. Instead of a query parameter ?page=3, listing responses now include a field "next_page": "Pa46c" which needs to be passed as ?page_cursor=Pa46c. The existing pagination method is still supported for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in the next version. > > > > ### User data export/import > > > > Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly. > > > > ### Time zone handling > > > > Lemmy didn't have any support for timezones, which led to bugs when federating with other platforms. This is now fixed by using UTC timezone for all timestamps. > > > > ### ARM64 Support > > > > Thanks to help from @raskyld and @kroese, there are now offical Lemmy releases for ARM64 available. > > > > ### Activity now includes voters > > > > - Previously, site and community activity counts were only based on people who commented, or posted. Those counts now include anyone who voted on a comment or post as well. Thanks to @Ategon for this change. > > > > ## Upgrade instructions > > > > Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes. > > > > If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat. > > > > Pict-rs 0.5 is also close to releasing. The upgrade takes a while due to a database migration, so read the migration guide to speed it up. Note that Lemmy 0.19 still works perfectly with pict-rs 0.4. > > > > ## Thanks to everyone > > > > We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute. > > > > ## Support development > > > > We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users. > > > > This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing 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. > > > > Read more details in the funding drive announcement.

A couple of weeks have passed, the dust seems to have settled but there are a few important questions remaining. These give a little concern for the future.

Is there more than one admin able to update the instance?

Does someone other than Tom have access to the server in case it goes down or has a problem?

Are backups being taken and if so does more than one person have access to them?

Wikipedia Article, Website. I love this colour scheme and I was wondering if an admin can take a look at adding a theme for it. If you did I would really appreciate it.

First off, I understand that this isn't our top priority right now, but I am scared that this can will be kicked far too down the road. I also don't want to cause a storm of drama here, nor a split. No hard feelings here to Emperor, Tom or Albatross.

Preface

When we came up with the idea for our next Instance to replace feddit.uk, we settled on a name and bought a domain for it. That domain was quackhouse.uk . We decided it was a fun-loving name and carried numerous benefits: • .UK TLD. Which was very important. • Not tied to Reddit. • Easy to say and memorable • Not tied to Lemmy. • Not tied to the Fediverse.

We were quite excited for Quackhouse, and to have such a last minute development for Quackhouse was disappointing.

Why Quackhouse?

Why did we decide the last two weren't a good idea? Well, to start, people who are interested in Lemmy and the Federation aspect would go for a lemmy instance anyway regardless of the name. I believe we aren't that stupid as to say "oh, it has lemmy/federated in it, it must be good!". HOWEVER just say you are trying to persuade your mate down the pub to join. He likes the idea of a forum for British-type subjects with no advertisements, tracking, and is voluntary donation-funded. However he isn't tech savvy. It would still be perfectly reasonable to tell him "Hey! There's a really nice community for discussing UK Related subjects! It's called Quackhouse.uk! (Mention some forums etc), Want to join?" Therefore for all he knows is that he's joined up to a site, there is content and discussion, he's happy. He doesn't know yet that there are users from other websites interacting with him, but he knows how to use it and he's happy. He'll probably figure out about it eventually but it won't be off-putting.

This approach wouldn't harm the "power-user" tech enthusiast, but it would be inviting to both and benefit growth.

Lemmy's growth problem

People were saying during Reddit's downfall to "join Lemmy" but I must be honest, even I resisted at first. The whole step of choosing an instance was REALLY off-putting. So I think an alternative approach would be to tell people about the instance instead of the fediverse in some cases.

The Feddit.UK problem

Has anyone here tried telling anyone who wasn't in the know about Feddit.uk? If you don't believe me, tell someone. Your response will most likely be: "Is that a Reddit knockoff?" Everytime I have told someone about this place, I have gotten a weird look and something to the tune of this response. Reddit isn't really the most heavily regarded site in the eyes of some, so who would want to make a Knock-off Reddit

I am not Tom and I mean no harm at all to him, but I reckon he kind of just set this up in haste as a pet project (which is perfectly fine, I have had similar experiences)

The fact of the matter is, this is a Reddit knockoff. You cannot deny it. And the main reason you cannot deny it is because it's literally in the name. However we can claim that the upvote/downvote layout is just a bog-standard forum layout (quite a few sites like Stack Overflow use it now anyway)

And I think this community is better than being named after a Reddit knockoff.

Feddit.UK's doomed future.

Feddit.UK has two inevitable futures.

1. • The Fediverse loses hype along with lemmy and everyone who wants to join has joined. We fade into obscurity.
2. • We keep growing, and then Reddit will eventually notice and will shut us down because we literally are infringing their copyright. We have no basis or ground to defend that.

My proposal to you:

We change domains, preferably to Quackhouse.uk. We even had a logo and a mascot designed 🦆. We were on the verge of launching it as well, domain bought, server bought.

My proposed method.

I don't think we should see this as making a new community per say, but making an extension of an already existing house and moving our good stuff over to the new part of the building. Or even better yet; just a name change

We do this in phases:

1: The hatching: Once we have everything soon enough settled, we make Quackhouse.UK as it was planned. Enable sign ups.

2: The Flock Migration: We migrate all of our main staple-UK communities over to Quackhouse. Eventually culminating in them being closed here through turning off posting.

3. Shut down Feddit.UK sign-ups. Keep the instance itself running forever unless Reddit get angry. People can keep their feddit accounts, just keep it updated for legacy's sake. Put no pressure on Feddit users to migrate their accounts, but maybe offer the option.

Why not make Quackhouse a separate Instance and keep Feddit.UK unlocked? Right now, Feddit.UK is the Go-To place for British Discourse on Lemmy. We need the whole community behind this and unity. If we keep Feddit.UK up, then it will likely choke out Quackhouse's communities as there would be no reason to switch. Quackhouse was always planned to be a new home for Feddit.UK users. However, now Tom has kind of come in last minute and... Well.. our plans are a bit screwed.

Feddit.de is fine, though?

For now it is, I feel it will face a similar fate if it grows. Reddit is not going to like this violation one way or another.

All country specific instances uses feddit

While that holds a bit of water, there's no reason why we have to conform to that.

Opinion

I think it's more worthwhile inconveniencing people to resub to specific communties rather than letting them die in the inevitable downfall.

Summary

Feddit.uk is a problemed name and it needs to be changed. I propose we push on with changing it promptly, but when the time is right. It should be done in a way so that people don't lose their existing feddit.uk accounts.

We're looking to put together some more detailed rules on what should and should not be submitted to the instance. Things such as, but not exclusively:

• What types of message you would always like to see removed on sight
• Whether there are any types of message which should be left up (borderline, with strong corrections from the community)
• Where the line is drawn on political views (and how gray areas should be treated)

I'll make no bones: Moderating uk/ukpol has been a learning experience for me. I've learned that there often isn't much difference between "leaving a comment up because the community has done an excellent job highlighting flaws" and "I should have removed this hours ago, the community shouldn't have to do this". As there isn't a way to mod-tag a post, inaction on negative posts can reflect badly on the instance as a whole.

Having some clear guidelines/rules will hopefully simplify things. And more admins should mean that if a report isn't looked at, someone can review it as an escalation.

I've also enabled the slur filters. And we'll be listening to see if anything needs adding/removing (the template had swearing blocked :| )

So...Answers on a postcard, I guess!

Hi all, sorry for a lack of updates but there's been a lot going on behind the scenes and events moved rather rapidly.

I recently posted that we were going to have to move to another instance because our only Admin was missing and problems looked to be piling up.

Fortunately, Tom dropped me a line the other day and he has updated the instance and made GreatAlbatross and myself Admins.

So the immediate crisis has been averted and we've fallen back to the original plan which was get more Admins in place and work to ensure there's no single point of failure, so any one of us could get hit by a bus (bagsy not me) and the instance will carry on.

Soooo bear with us while we thrash out the details of what else needs doing to ensure the continuity of the instance and while I figure out what all the new buttons do (hopefully not by mashing them all at once just to see what happens).

In the meantime there are likely problems that need fixing. I know, for example, that some are still having email verification problems and have been waiting a while, so I'll figure out how to resolve this and work through the pinned post here. If you have this problem then post there and we'll get it sorted.

If there are any other issues you want to flag up for attention then you can do so here or contact one of the new admins.

And, finally, thanks to everyone for their enthusiasm for this instance in the other thread and elsewhere, if the folks on here hadn't formed a great community that they felt was worth the time and effort to save we wouldn't be here now with the future looking more secure. Tom built the house but you all made it a home. So carry on...

edit 1: I'll keep tagging things on as I think of them. Firstly, we'll be keeping the Matrix space - it'll be our fallback if the server goes down and provides people with an encrypted (and private if needed) channel of communication. If you add your Matrix ID to your profile it adds a secure DMs button to your.profile, so Matrix and Lemmy are integrated to a degree.

Sooo if you skim the previous posts on here, you'll know that Feddit.uk's only Admin (@Tom@feddit.uk) has been missing for a couple of months and in that time we were defederated by lemmy.world (although we're back now) and we are one upgrade behind (just a minor fix) with one much bigger one whistling down the pipeline that may defederate us from other instances that upgrade (it may not but I know most of us don't want to roll those dice).

We've tried various ways of contacting Tom and had no reply so we are forced to move forwards with moving to a new instance.

So, this is the plan:

Phase 1: Register a domain hndone by greatalbatross.

Phase 2: Sort out hosting - done by me.

Phase 3: Start instance - pending a final inspection of the hosting in the next day or so.

Phase 4: Onboarding - this will happen in waves:

Wave 1: Admins go in and make sure nothing is broken.

Wave 2: Moderators sign-up and re-start communities, get any bots running and just generally get a second set of eyes on things so we can be happy that we are ready to let people in.

Wave 3: We'll start adding people already on Feddit.uk by hand - invitations will presumably have to go to inboxes on feddit.uk so we can ensure no-one is poaching a username for devilment. This will give the system a bit of a stress test.

Wave 4: We'll let people apply to join and this should get things moving quicker.

Wave 5: Open registration.

Phase 5: Shuttering Feddit.uk - the Moderators will post pinned messages in their communities directing people to the new ones and then we'll start the sad process of closing down the communities that we can.

Events should all start moving pretty quickly and, whole I may be being optimistic, we will likely reach the point of no return (specifically Tom's return) in a week or two.

Current Admins:  

• Domain: @GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
• Hosting: me @Emperor@feddit.uk
• Instance: 20cx12 and @flamingos@feddit.uk
• Finance: TBD
• Ambassadors: TBD
• Customer services: TBD

There's a Matrix space that we'll keep as a fallback in case if problems with the instant (although it will be renamed at some point). It also provides secure encrypted communication if anyone needed to flag anything up privately (and Matrix is built into Lemmy - add your Matrix ID into your profile and it provides a secure messaging button in your profile, so if you need to contact an Admin you can do it directly from there too, at least for me).

Sorry about all hassle, none of us wanted this but it is forced upon us and the feeling from everyone's previous comments is that we didn't want to lose what we have here, even if we have to rebuild in a new instance.

I'll throw the floor open to comments and questions.

More possible woes for Feddit.uk? The next version of Lemmy is coming but it's at least 4 weeks away.

Reading the comments though, is was interesting to find out there are two guys developing Lemmy full time with another two about to join. That doesn't include the people who contribute in their spare time as well.

We are federated with the paedophile instance people have been complaining about. And I don't think I want to wait until their content starts showing in my time line. We need an admin ASAP or jump ship.

See here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/6400367