Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Going to pin this for 24 hours so all mods hopefully get a chance to see it! Sorry!

As we continue to expand on the mod tools for Lemmy.zip community mods, I thought I'd better start keeping a collection of them in a post, what the tools do, and how they can be used.

All commands are invoked by sending a PM to ZippyBot with the relevant text commands.

---

Welcome Message

The Welcome Message feature allows a community mod to set a custom "Welcome message" for a community that gets sent to a user when they subscribe to a community.

Welcome Messages can be set up by sending the command #welcome -c community_name -m "welcome message" to ZippyBot. You'll receive a reply back confirming this has been successful.

Anyone that subscribes to your community after this will receive the PM you set up. The PM will be sent by a bot account called WelcomeBot specifically set up for this task.

Important notes

• The text of your welcome message must start and end with a speech/quote mark, i.e. "welcome text".
• You can use any punctuation/markdown you want, including emojis and links.
• You can change the message by sending the same command with updated text.
• You can delete the message entirely by using the command #welcomedelete community_name.

Example

!

The full code for this looks like: ``` #welcome -c gaming -m “Welcome to the Lemmy.zip Gaming Community!

All content related to gaming on any platform is welcome here including links to news articles, discussions about the latest games, and reviews of games from across all genres.

Please remember to follow the rules in the sidebar 😊

---

This is an automated message. Beep Boop. " ``` ---

Autopost/Scheduled Posts

The Autopost/Scheduled Post features allows mods to set either a one-off or recurring post in their community, which is then pinned. If the post is a recurring post, the old post is unpinned and the new post is pinned when it is triggered.

A typical command would look like #autopost -c community_name -t post_title -b post_body -d day -h time -f frequency

• -c - This defines the name of the community you are setting this up for. This is the original name of the community when you created it.
• -t - This defines the title of the post. You can use the modifiers listed below here.
• -b - This is the body of your post. This field is optional, so you don't need to include it if you don't want a body to your post. You can use the modifiers listed below here too.
• -u - This defines a URL you can add to your post. This field is optional, so you don't need to include it.
• -d - This defines a date you want the first post to occur in YYYYMMDD format, i.e. 20230612 which would be 12th June 2023, or the day of the week you want your thread to be posted on, i.e. monday.
• -h - This defines the time of the day you want this thread to be posted, i.e. 12:00. All times are UTC!
• -f - This defines how often your thread will be posted. The options that currently exist are once, weekly, fortnightly, 4weekly, or monthly.

There are some modifiers you can use either in the title field (-t) or the body field (-b).

• %d - This will be replaced by the day of the month, i.e. 12
• %m - This will be replaced by the name of the month, i.e. June.
• %y - This will be replaced by the current year, i.e. 2024
• %w - This will be replaced by the day of the week, i.e. Monday. For example, having -t Weekly Thread %d %m might be created as Weekly Thread 12 June depending on the day it is posted.

Finally, if you want to delete a scheduled autopost, use the command #autopostdelete with the ID number of the autopost, i.e. #autopostdelete 1. You can also delete the latest pinned thread if you include y at the end, i.e #autopostdelete 1 y.

Important notes

• Using the once frequency means your post will never be unpinned, you'll need to do this manually.
• The post will be created and pinned by ZippyBot, so you won't receive replies to your inbox.

Example

#autopost -c gaming -t What are you playing this week? %m %d %y Edition -b Hey there everybody! Weekly check in time once again. So… What are you playing this week? -d Monday -h 07:00 -f weekly

This creates the weekly thread in the Gaming community.

---

RSS Feeds

This allows a mod to add an RSS feed to their community, which ZippyBot will regularly check and create a new post if a new RSS post is detected.

A typical command would look like #rss -url rss_url -c community name - but there are a few modifiers you can use.

• url - This is the URL of the rss feed, and is mandatory.
• c - This is the community name and is mandatory.
• t - This will tag your post titles with a preceding tag in square brackets, i.e. -t "RSS POST" will result in each post being tagged with [RSS POST]
• title_inc - Adding this will mean that only posts that INCLUDE the string you define will be posted, i.e. -title_inc "title must be included". The speech marks are mandatory if you use this option, and you can have multiple filters by using a commma between them.
• title_exc - Adding this will EXCLUDE any posts that match this string, i.e. -title_exc "dont include this". The speech marks are mandatory if you use this option.
• url_inc - Adding this will filter the post based on the link to the content in the RSS feed. You can use it in a way such as -url_inc "goodlink.com" to ensure that only posts where the link to the content is for goodlink.com. Speech marks are mandatory.
• url_exc - Adding this will exclude content based on the link to the content RSS feed, such as -url_exc "badlink.com". Speech marks are mandatory.
• new_only - Adding this will mean that on the creation of this RSS feed, ZippyBot won't scan for existing posts and only start looking at posts after starting this feed.

Finally, if you want to delete an RSS feed from your community, use the command #rssdelete with the ID number of the RSS feed, i.e. #rssdelete 1.

Important notes

• ZippyBot checks for new RSS posts every 10 minutes
• ZippyBot makes the RSS post, so you won't receive a notification of a reply to a post.
• If you don't use the -new_only flag, you'll get the last 3 posts on the first time this command is used.

Example

#rss -url https://rss-url.xml -c gaming

---

As I develop new tools or work on existing ones, I'll continue to add them here or update the commands.

We're always on the lookout for what we can add too, so if you have any ideas for new tools we're really open to hearing them and seeing if we can implement them.

Final important note - while all these tools work to some degree, I can't guarantee they're bug free. I may need to reset these at some point if a bug is discovered. Please let me know if anything doesn't work as expected!___

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hello all, welcome to the May server update!

Lets have a look back at what has happened over the last month, and what could be happening into the future.

---

New Communities

We've had a few new communities pop up, please check them out, interact with them, and give them a subscribe!

• Remnant
• Legal News
• Webgames
• Civil Aviation

There are also some existing communities that are looking for mods. Fancy trying out being a mod with a pre-existing community? Now is your chance!

• Tesla (142 Subscribers)
• Playstation (547 Subscribers)
• Xbox (185 Subscribers)
• Apple (391 Subscribers)
• Star Trek (159 subscribers)

---

Server Updates

We've been on our new server over a month now, with amazing performance, and no downtime (outside of planned maintenance!).

This has allowed me more time to look at the secondary services and less time intervening in restarting a broken server.

To that end, I have started a collection of Mod Tools that are built into Lemmy.zip in this thread. Lemmy doesn't really come with any tools outside of the report button, so I've been trying to build the tools that I think help support mods but also make our communities friendly places to be. I think very early on there was a general consensus that moderation shouldn't be automated and I've tried to stick to that ethos wherever possible. There are no tools that take moderation actions without a community mod or an Admin stepping in to review first.

I will continue to add more tools as I am able to get them tested and running on the site - very soon I'll have the next tool up on there which allows community mods to set their own "words" for the bot to look out for - for example, you can set it to scan for the word "bread" and every time it finds that word in a new post or comment in that community, it will generate a report for the mod. This allows mods to set their own dictionary of words they don't want to appear in their communities. (We still have an instance-wide bad words list but that works differently now, and instead lets the admins know on Matrix when a bad word has been detected - these are the sorts of words that we absolutely won't allow and/or break the law.)

Luckily our application process helps to weed out most of the spammers and bad actors. We don't generally allow spam/throwaway email addresses (Although I do fully understand why people want to use them, so we do allow email forwarding addresses - I myself use Proton's email forwarding thing all the time!).

We read each and every application message and do reject those that we feel aren't genuine (the amount of applications that just say "lemmy in" is wild) - that said, we very much do appreciate those who take the time to write something funny or personal in them, and they do brighten our day!

Ps - thanks to those who have helped to test these tools out and iron out the bugs!

Over the next month I think we'll see Lemmy 0.19.4 released, bringing with it a bunch of new updates and fixes.

---

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

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

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

It’s natural to see fluctuations in user activity over time, and we’ve seen this over the wider lemmy-verse for some time now. However, if you’ve found a home here and love this space, now is the perfect opportunity to help us thrive.

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

Please don't be a lurker! :)

---

Donations

Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip has now tipped over 50 euros a month ($54, £43) and is mostly funded by the community!

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

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the site and keeping the virtual lights on.

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

I am also looking at future fundraiser ideas (fundraiser committee anyone!) - if you have any ideas please let me know either in the comments, via PM, or on Matrix.

---

Graph time!

Due to a (now fixed) issue with Prometheus, I can't show you the full 30 days of the server performance. Instead, the CPU/RAM are over the last 7 days.

Instead, have a bonus image of the current server details as I type this:

!

Now to the usual stats:

CPU - Yes, we're not using very much at all.

!

RAM - I'm pretty happy with this, the performance is exactly where I want it to be.

!

Image hosting:

!

Cloudflare overview for the last 30 days:

!

Requests over 30 days:

!

Bandwidth over 30 days:

!

Unique visitors over 30 days:

!

Traffic: (I don't know whats happened in Singapore to drive up traffic - popular fediverse server maybe?) Finland is where Lemmy.world is hosted (along with Lemm.ee and Lemmy.zip!) which is why we see so much traffic from there.

!

So that's it for a relatively stable April - We'll see what happens in May!

As always if there is anything else you'd like to see I am happy to add it in, just let me know.

PS - next time I do one of these we'll be only a few days short of 1 year old!!!

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

I've noticed that Lemmy.ml user comments are showing up multiple times. Does anyone else see this behavior? Perhaps it is a federation issue.

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hello all, and welcome to the April 2024 Server update.

What a busy month we've had! I hope you enjoyed the April fools IPO announcement. Obviously, we're not going public.

---

New Communities

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

• Weird West
• Squared Circle - Welcome to all the Kbin refugees!

---

Server Updates

What. A. Month.

Following our previous server upgrade a little while back, we'd seen that performance was steadily decreasing and the site performance was slowing down too, sometimes taking seconds to load a page.

This is what I was seeing on the 27th March:

!

As you can see, all red = not good.

I first tried offloading all secondary services to a second server (like the mobile/old UIs and some of the admin tools we run) which unfortunately didn't have much of an impact overall - the server just wasn't able to handle all the traffic and database operations anymore.

For reference, the server was a 4 core (vcpu's - so 4 threads) Virtual dedicated server with 16gb of RAM (Hetzner CCX23). In some form this was still the original server we started Lemmy.zip on, just rescaled through Hetzner's platform. At this point, rescaling it up again just wasn't financially viable, as the performance to price benefit stopped being in favour of cloud servers, and now tipped over to proper dedicated servers.

So, after researching the best long-term solutions I settled on Hetzner's EX44 dedicated server. It has 12 cores (20 threads!) and 64GB of RAM.

It is a beast.

This is the comparison performance as I type this:

!

This should give us plenty of growing room as the fediverse continues to expand.

Other things that happened in March include ZippyBot properly breaking, and dealing with a large spam wave hitting the Lemmy network.

ZippyBot decided it just didn't want to work anymore, at which point I realised that due to my own poor programming I hadn't put enough detail in Zippy's logs, which look a bit like this:

!

We use Zippy a lot, like sending welcome messages to new users, background moderation stuff, stopping spam users etc. So having Zippy not working was not ideal.

The problem was that Zippy wasn't throwing any errors, it was just stopping and not restarting, seemingly randomly. During the initial debug phase, I implemented a docker healthcheck into Zippy (another new thing I had to learn how to do!) and used another container to keep restarting Zippy if the the healthcheck came back unhealthy.

Finally, it turned out that the RSS feature built into Zippy for community mods was failing when the URL it reached out to for the feed didn't exist anymore. One of the RSS feeds had changed their URL and not put a redirect in, so Zippy was hitting a 404 error and failing silently. There is a check when the RSS feed is set up to make sure the feed exists, but not one after that. Lesson learned.

The Lemmy network saw a large spam wave attack from the EvilToast instance, which was resulting in multiple accounts sending thousands of comments/posts a minute and overwhelming some instances. To get around this, I temporarily defederated from EvilToast for the period of the attack, until their admin confirmed they had implemented a captcha and stopped completely open signups. Instances that allow completely open signups are usually targeted by spammers due to the easy way they can create so much traffic. Hopefully new instances being created into the future will learn from this and enforce at least some method of validating their users.

---

As promised, here is a breakdown of the server move process. If you don't care about sysadmin stuff, you can safely skip this next bit.

Making the move to the new server was a new experience for me (If you weren't aware, I am not a sysadmin by trade and am learning as I go!) so the day of the move was a bit nerve wrecking with visions of accidentally losing the database forever. This is the rough order of steps I took during the maintenance window.

First, I backed up the old server using Hetzner's very handy cloud backup tool. That took about 10 minutes, after which I changed the nginx config to point away from lemmy itself. It was meant to point to the status site but i misconfigured the nginx file and instead it sent traffic to Authentik (our admin SSO solution to lock down our backend services). Oh well, this was the only thing that went wrong thankfully so I'll take that.

I stopped all the docker containers on both servers (main lemmy server and secondary UI server) and then compressed the postgres database files. While this was happening, I recreated the folder structure on the new server, and spun up Portainer, and then the Lemmy services stack so that the files/configs needed were generated and all in the right place, before shutting lemmy back down until everything was ready.

I then rsynced the database between both servers, and decompressed it in the correct place on the new server. All in all this took about an hour, mostly waiting for the files to compress/decompress. At this point I needed to change the DNS records to point to the new server, so I could request all the SSL certs for the required domains. This is when I took the old server offline and changed the DNS records in Cloudflare to point to the new IP.

Once I had requested the SSL certs, I then created the nginx config files for lemmy and some of the important subdomains (i.e. the mobile site) at which point everything was in place for lemmy to be turned back on. After a very tense couple of minutes (and a few container restarts!) lemmy.zip finally came back to life just as it had been left, and pretty quickly I could see federation was working as we started to pull new posts through.

Next up was fixing pictrs as images weren't loading - that service has a real issue with memory requirements and was stuck in a boot loop, so giving it access to 10 gigs of memory (a bit overkill admittedly) brought it back to life. And we were back!

The next hour or two was spent re-implementing the backend services, checking everything was working correctly, testing emails and images, and then finally deciding on and testing a backup solution.

As Backblaze has served us so well for images, our solution will back everything on the server up during the night (UTC) and then securely store it in a private Backblaze B2 bucket, with a full versioning solution for suitable daily, weekly, monthly and yearly backups. Good stuff. I do need to test this soon though to make sure it works on a restore. Will probably spin up a Hetzner cloud server and try it out.

I am happy to expand on this process if anyone is interested, just ask away in the comments.

---

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

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

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

It’s natural to see fluctuations in user activity over time, and we’ve seen this over the wider lemmy-verse for some time now. However, if you’ve found a home here and love this space, now is the perfect opportunity to help us thrive.

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

---

Donations

Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip has now tipped over 50 euros a month ($54, £43) and that's not including the surrounding services (email, URL, hosting the seperate status server - which I am covering myself).

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

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the site and keeping the virtual lights on.

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

I am also looking at future fundraiser ideas (fundraiser committee anyone!) - if you have any ideas please let me know either in the comments, via PM, or on Matrix.

---

Graph time!

This was the monthly performance of the Old server before it was turned off:

!

You can see the demand really start to ramp up towards the end of the month.

This was the 24 hour performance on the 28th:

!

The hourly peaks were where the performance really dropped out for about 20 minutes, followed by 40 minutes of still pretty poor performance.

This is the performance of the new server of the last 24 hours:

!

Just a little bit of a difference :)

Our current image hosting stats:

!

This is our Cloudflare overview for the last month:

!

Cloudflare requests:

!

Cloudflare bandwidth:

!

Cloudflare unique visitors:

!

Cloudflare traffic:

!

And that's pretty much it. As always, if there's anything you'd like more information on, or you'd like to see included in these regularly, let me know.

Cheers,

Demigodrick

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

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

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

New Communities

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

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

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

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

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

---

Server Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

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

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

It’s natural to see fluctuations in user activity over time, and we’ve seen this over the wider lemmy-verse for some time now. However, if you’ve found a home here and love this space, now is the perfect opportunity to help us thrive.

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

---

Donations

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

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

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

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

---

Graph time

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

Cpu:

!

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

!

Disk/storage:

!

Image storage:

!

Cloudflare overview:

!

Cloudflare requests:

!

Cloudflare bandwidth:

!

Cloudflare visitors:

!

Cloudflare traffic:

!

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

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

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

Cheers,

Demigodrick

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

So the general situation is explained here:

https://lemmy.world/post/11959030

Basically there was a moderation disagreement that lead the community to move here:

!tenforward@lemmy.world

That is why Risa has been so slow as of late. Everyone jumped ship and people like me missed it as any posts discussing the drama were deleted. See the mod log: https://startrek.website/modlog/8

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

Hi All,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks

Demigodrick

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

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

New Communities

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

• Video Game Artwork
• ThinkPad Setups
• Scam Numbers

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

---

Server Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

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

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

It’s natural to see fluctuations in user activity over time, and we’ve seen this over the wider lemmy-verse for some time now. However, if you’ve found a home here and love this space, now is the perfect opportunity to help us thrive.

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

---

Donations

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Graph time

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

CPU:

!

Memory:

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

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

!

Disk:

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

Images:

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

!

Cloudflare

Overall stats:

!

Requests over 30 days: !

Bandwidth over 30 days: !

Unique visitors over 30 days: !

And finally traffic per country over 30 days: !

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

Cheers,

Demigodrick

Hello everyone, I joined lemmy.zip today. I've been using lemmy.world for the past month and have decided to move out to the fringe. This instance looks amazing and I'm happy to have joined. Over at lemmy.world I mod a small community !ancientcoincleaning@lemmy.world and since its a small niche community lemmy.zip hasn't been syncing with it which is expected. When I try to subscribe to my community however I get an error and I was wondering if its just me. I've posted the error which seems to be an issue with the json format. I believe both instances are running the same version of lemmy so i wouldn't expect them to have issues fetching posts from each other.

Hello all, we're trialling out a new front end for Lemmy.zip, which promises to give a cleaner mobile experience than voyager. The software is quite new, and so for now we'll be trialling this at:

beta.lemmy.zip

The site will work on both mobile and PC, but be warned it is in beta and lacks lots of features, so is for testing at the moment.

Please let me know how you get on if you do decide to test it!

Any errors you can put in the comments below or feel free to log on the github page

Beware the jank :)

Is there a way to prevent a horizontal scrol bar inbetween a post like the one below? An automatic new line or a force one would be useful, but if i use enter myself it just destoys the formating post

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

I decided to move from kbin to lemmy because of all the federation issues between the two, and even when stuff does federate to kbin, it's usually annoyingly lagged behind the actual post time.

Here I notice everything federates quickly but I still notice some posts just never federate at all. For example this post shows on the main instance as well as my alt account on dbzer0 but not here.

Not blaming this site in particular, just wondering if this is a widespread issue that is being worked on upstream? Or is this just one of the downsides of federated social networking?

Hello all, that time of the week again!

In case you're new and want some context, here are the previous parts:

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

TL;DR

• New Theme - Its very shiny!
• New front-end client - old.lemmy.zip!
• Bot updates - bot does even more than last time!
• Funding - Thank you so much!
• Interaction - Weekly reminder to not lurk!
• We want a mod or two - we promise not to refer to you as "landed gentry"!
• Server update - graphs and stuff!

New Theme

Sami has been hard at work looking at themes and tweaks to make Lemmy.zip stand out as a unique instance. Sami put together this awesome looking theme and we've applied it as the default theme so all new users get to see our glory. If you do notice any issues, let Sami know so he can look into it.

We've discussed other themes too, maybe a custom light mode theme so watch this space. You can set any theme you want in your user settings.

New front-end Client

In a bid to continue to provide cool ways to interact with Lemmy.zip, at the beginning of the week we set up and tested Old.Lemmy.Zip which is a really cool reddit-alike front end with features such as infinite scrolling. If that is your sort of thing, check it out! (We notice some of the bigger instances have copied us now :))

Bot Updates

Following on from last week when the bot PM'd all new users, the bot will now PM anyone who creates a new community with helpful information on how to gain users and traction. It looks a little like this:

!

We're still working on adding suggestions so if you have any you think would be useful for new moderators to get users, let me know and I can add them in to the PM.

Funding

As always, a massive thank you to those who continue to support Lemmy.zip financially.

As we've existed over a month now we're starting to see invoices rolling in which have been added to OpenCollective, and we'll continue to add these as we get them. Once we're in a clearer position r.e. long term funding, we'll look to invest in an improved server. Hopefully we can share more info come August.

Interaction

Welcome to all the new users of Lemmy.zip this week, whether you're just browsing different instances or have made Lemmy.zip your home.

As I like to drone on about, Lemmy lives or dies on content and interaction. So if you were previously a lurker, please don't be afraid to join in. This isn't Reddit. You're not fighting against bot spam and power mods. Everyone is genuinely interested in your opinion here.

Please make sure to vote, comment, and create posts or communities :)

A call for Mods!

We're looking at growing our "official" (I'm not sure thats the right word but it will have to do!) communities on Lemmy.zip and are looking for one or two people who would like to help out. Currently that would be the Home and Gaming communities, but we're open to the creation of other communities.

If this is something you'd be interested in doing, please join our Matrix Chat and either send me a PM or let us know in the chat, and we can discuss further. There aren't any restrictions (preferably a Lemmy.zip user who is active) and we'll consider anyone interested on a case by case basis.

Server updates

Time for the fun graphs!

This is the CPU usage over the last week. !

And here are some bonus network related graphs over the last week: !

Our image bucket continues to fill up nicely:

!

And here are our Cloudflare stats over 7 days:

!

Not much has changed in the way of visitor traffic, USA still tops the leaderboard:

!

And here is our bandwidth over the last 30 days:

!

Interestingly the numbers seem to show that Saturday is the least busy day for us, with an early/mid-week peak!

That's all this week, but as always let me know if there is anything else you'd like to know about.

Thanks

Demidogrick

Hey all,

Are you tired of flashy designs and modern web layouts? Craving that nostalgic feeling of the good old days?

Well I have some great news for you.

Introducing old.lemmy.zip

Go back 5 years and relive your younger days browsing that website but with all the luxury of knowing you're using Lemmy!

Just like our mobile site you can log in, browse, and fully interact with Lemmy.

Enjoy! And err... sorry.

I did the check for adding 2FA and got the pop up saying to save, scroll down and do something. But didn't see the info on the page after so I unchecked 2FA and saved again. Now any time I try to log in, I'm being asked for my 2FA token, which I don't have because I never finished setting it up due to not seeing the link to complete. I'm still logged in via liftoff, but don't think I can change that setting here. Any way to fix this or will I need to create a new account?

Hey there, this is the weekly thread for all general topics and any questions. You can also join us on Matrix for a chat!

I noticed I could not see most posts on communities like !dach@feddit.de when I'm logged in. My suspicion is that that's because these posts have their Language set to German and in my profile, I have only English and Undetermined, but there are no other Languages to select. I tested this on some communities on sopuli.xyz in Finnish, and again I can see posts if I'm logged out, but as soon as I log in, the communities are empty.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Hello all,

That time of the week again! In case you haven't already read them:\ Previous Parts

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

TL;DR

• Lemmy version update - completed to 0.18.2!
• Mobile site - tap away!
• Bot updates - cool bot does even more stuff!
• Email - we have more emails now!
• Lemmy.zip interaction - please interact!
• Funding - thanks!
• Server update - a few fun graphs!

Lemmy update

At the beginning of the week we attempted to upgrade to 0.18.2 a couple of times, each time resulting in the UI not talking to the backend server software and leaving a blank Lemmy page with no interaction. It appears that mobile apps that queried the backend directly continued to work.

Thankfully we backed up before the upgrade (and have daily backups anyway) and did a restore, but this took upwards of 20 minutes to rebuild. After a couple of attempts of this, we gave up testing in production and spun up a temp dev site so we could run further tests without impacting user exeperience.

Thankfully on the dev site we were able to work out that the issue lay with the extra security measures introduced in 0.18.2 and so we worked backwards (with some external help) to figure out it was an issue being caused by Cloudflare's Rocket Loader functionality, which was causing a violation with the new security measures. I toggled the switch in Cloudflare and everything immediately started working, and so we applied this to live and everything upgraded straight away.

Not a fun period of time but I look at it as a learning experience!

PS - we have a chat on Matrix where you can keep up to date on whats going on, get the latest updates etc. Anyone is free to join!

Mobile Site

For those not aware, we now have a mobile site hosted on the server. This is the Voyager software (previously known as Wefwef) - It is a webapp that you can install to your homescreen.

You can see the site by going to (https://m.lemmy.zip). While anyone from any instance can use it, its tailored towards Lemmy.zip users.

Bot Updates

Zippybot continues to get smarter. Zippybot will now PM new users to Lemmy.zip upon signup, so they can get all the information they need straight away.

This is a copy of the PM new users will get:

!

This has allowed us to unpin the "Read Me" post from the Local page so you should have a cleaner browsing experience, and we'll reserve stickied posts in Local to announcements or short term posts like this one.

The bot is being worked on to help provide advice, suggestions and guidance when users interact with certain parts of the instance, i.e. signing up. We'll look to expand this to creating new communities shortly, and then we'll continue to look for ways to help out.

Email

We've changed email providers from Brevo (who allowed 300 emails a day) to another provider that allows 300 emails per hour. It also now allows us to send and receive email from other accounts now, and so our new contact email is hello@lemmy.zip. If you have any questions you're more than welcome to email us at that address.

Interaction

As always we'd like to welcome new users to Lemmy.zip, and you can find some really helpful information here and here.

What I'd really to encourage people to do is interact. There are lots of memes popping up about it and lots of posts explaining the importance. We don't have a userbase the size of Reddit, so what we need is people to be that core userbase Reddit had and become posters not lurkers.

Lemmy will live and die based on your interactions with both this instance and the wider Lemmyverse so please, if you create an account, subscribe to what interests you and then create posts, upvote, and comment on everything you can!

We have an open community create policy so feel free to create communities on subjects that interest you.

Funding

I'd once again like to thank everyone who has donated towards the upkeep of Lemmy.zip, it has allowed us to expand and improve the experience in many ways.

We're pretty much sorted, as things currently stand, for the next 10 to 12 months. However we'd like to upgrade the server for better performance, improve page loading times and look to expand the functionality of Lemmy.zip. So if you've been enjoying Lemmy.zip and would like to see it grow, please consider donating.

Server update/graphs

Now for the fun part!

This is CPU usage of the server over the last 24 hours. Due to restoring the server within the last 7 days I can't pull usage graphs for it, but will be able to show these next week again.

!

Here you can see the image storage stats:

!\ Almost 40 gigs of images!

Here are the Cloudflare stats over the last 7 days:\ !

And here are the visitor numbers: ! USA has pulled in front of Finland again!

Thats all for now, but if there are any other stats you'd like to see, let us know!

Thanks Demigodrick

I had made a post on a Beehaw community. I see comments in my inbox, but when I click “Posts” in my profile nothing shows up. To be clear, the beehaw post is my only post ever on this account.

We have successfully upgraded to 0.18.2. It only took the best part of 5 hours, 4 restored backups and a whole temporary dev site spun up to figure out it was one tiny setting in Cloudflare that was causing all the issues. The joy.

I'm off to bed with an incredible headache. I sincerely apologise for all the downtime this evening/day, it is not something I want to make a habit of.

If you're on a mobile device and want an Apollo-like Lemmy experience, you can head over to m.lemmy.zip and see Voyager, a web app built for Lemmy.

You can log in with your Lemmy.zip account, and browse and post like you would with the browser, but in an easy-to-use interface.

Hi All,

That time of the week again!

I've decided to combine these topics together as they're somewhat related and I don't want to spam people's home pages with more than 2 pinned posts at any one time.

Previous Parts

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

TL:DR

• Threads Vote - We'll defederate for now
• Lemmy.zip interaction - please interact!
• Bot updates - cool bot does stuff!
• Funding - thanks!
• Server update - bigger server faster website!

Threads (Threxit)

Following the poll for defederation with Threads, the community has voted and has decided that this instance should defederate from Threads.

!

Therefore within the next few hours I'll be adding Threads.net to the defederation list, and we'll keep an eye out in case there is a different URL they use for federation. However, this is not a final say - we'll monitor how Meta connects to the fediverse and what impact this has on Lemmy, if any.

I am all for user choice/independence, so if the Lemmy devs add the option for users to set their own federation stances then we will look to use that instead of having the instance be defederated in totality.

As a community you get a say in what happens, so if there is strong enough feeling that we want to federate with them in the future, it will go back out as a vote.

It is also important to note that Threads is not yet using ActivityPub and we don't know if/when that move will happen. This is a preemptive decision.

Interaction

Just a reminder that platforms like this one live or die based on interaction with the content. I've seen stats that suggest over 90% of users on social media are lurkers, which ties up closely with our stats too. We have just broken the 1000 registered uses mark (Woo! 🥳) and so we're looking at ways to encourage participation on the instance. We will also look at how we introduce new users and what tools we can implement to encourage them to introduce themselves and contribute to communities.

Please, if you're a lurker and you're reading this, pop into a community and join in with the discussion. Lemmy needs you!

Bot updates

I've been working on a "friendly" bot that will allow users to interact with it in various ways, including using it to vote on polls, providing information to new users and anything else I can manage to get working. Thanks to those who helped test out the #score functionality, the bot passed with flying colours.

If you know anything about Python and databases, please hit me up on Matrix.

For anyone interested the git repo is here

Funding

We continue to have some very generous support from Lemmy.zip users. Thank you all who have donated or are thinking about it. As I'll go into in a minute, we've grown to a point where the server needed to be upgraded which produces additional costs.

Therefore if you’ve been enjoying Lemmy.zip and want to see it stick around, please consider donating. The first option is a "one time donation" option and the other three are recurring options.

Anything you're comfortable sparing will go 100% towards keeping Lemmy.zip running.

I've also started to add expenses to OpenCollective, so as the invoices start to roll in, you'll be able to see what we're spending on the server.

Server Update

There are two big server updates this week. Firstly, we've increased the performance of the server, and secondly we've upgraded to Lemmy 0.18.1.

Both of these have brought performance improvements with them, which is great. Since upgrading, we've had no 502 errors (where Lemmy.zip goes offline for 5 or so minutes) and we've not had to force-restart the server either.

Our server is now "CPX21" with Hetzner for those interested - 3 vcpus, 4gb RAM and we've doubled the storage space to 80GB for the Lemmy database etc.

This is the CPU usage over the last 7 days: !

This is the storage space on the server now:

!

Not much interesting has happened with emails this last week, these are the stats though:

!

Our images storage continues to grow quite nicely too:

!

And our Cloudflare stats show some lovely figures:

!

We also appear to be more popular in Finland now than the USA!

!

1 Month Old

Finally, Lemmy.zip turns 1 month old tomorrow. I'd just like to thank everyone that has been here and contributed to this lovely community, everyone that has donated, anyone that has made a suggestion or provided advice to help grow this instance and special thanks to Sami who has spent lots of his time helping out on the backend and keeping things running smoothly.

Thanks all,

Demigodrick