State of the lemdro.id (LW federation + infra upgrades + new frontend option)

Hey all! I've done a lot of database maintenance work lately and other things to make lemdro.id better. Wanted to give a quick update on what's up and ask for feedback.

For awhile, we were quite a ways behind lemmy.world federation (along with many other instances) due to a technical limitation in lemmy itself that is being worked on. I ended up writing a custom federation buffer that allowed us to process activities more consistently and am happy to say that we are fully caught up with LW and will not have that problem again!

Additionally, on the database side of things, I've setup barman in the cluster to allow for point of time backups. Basically, we can now restore the database to any arbitrary point in time. This is on top of periodic automatic backups which also gets pulled to storage both on my personal NAS as well as a Backblaze bucket (both encrypted of course).

Today, I deployed a new frontend at https://next.lemdro.id. This one is very early stages and experimental but is being developed by https://lemm.ee and seems promising!

If you live outside of the US and experience consistently long load times I want to hear from you! I am deploying the first read replica node to Europe soon, so if you live in that region you'll soon notice near-instaneous loading of content. Very exciting!

Finally, looking for feedback. Is there anything you want to see changed? Please let me know!