Lemmy

Hey, friends!

In the last couple weeks I upgraded our instance to run the latest version of Lemmy, and because it was consuming more RAM today I upgraded the VPS to one with 4GB.

This means that the cost for running the instance have gone up. Historically I've been paying around $20 per month out of my pocket to run the instance (after Ko-fi donations), and this will increase to $35 after the upgrade.

Our cost per user is around $0.10/month, so it's not a lot. If you can contribute money, even $1/month, please do, it really helps.

Thanks!

After 2 or 3 days, I have to login again. I've googled, but have not found any Lemmy setting that would allow me to remain logged in longer than this. I suspect people are going back to Reddit simply because they're always logged in there - month after month. I suspect there is a setting the instance admin can change. I'm hoping that Lemmy.studio's owner can answer this question... or anybody. Thanks.

Greetings,

I'm subscribed to citiesskylines@lemmy.ml. When logged into my lemmy.studio account, the latest cities skylines post is about 4 months old. But if I go to https://lemmy.ml/c/citiesskylines, there are a bunch of more recent posts. Any idea what might be going on?

Many thanks in advance.

Edit: this happens with some other communities too, not just cities skylines.

No major changes, just bug fixes.

Let me know if something's not working.

There has been a shitty incident where someone intentionally posted CSAM to a Lemmy community that unfortunately someone in our instance was subscribed to. Due to federation, the images might have been copied over to our instance storage.

Because of that I've taken the following measures until we understand the problem better:

1. I've defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
2. I've deleted all images uploaded since 2023-08-27 00:00:00 GMT.
3. I've disabled the image server.

I'll post updates when I have them. Thanks for understanding.

Link is also on the sidebar. We'll use it to keep people updated on releases and give support when people can't reach the Lemmy instance.

Also, I'm an IRC kind of person, so forgive my noobness with Matrix. 🙃

Hey, hey!

This morning (Pacific time) I changed the nameservers on lemmy.studio, switching to a service that provides a CDN and a WAF. It's a cautionary measure to protect us from DDOS attacks. That caused some instabilities, sorry for that.

I also noticed that the CDN was too aggressive, caching URLs regardless of the Content-type, and it seems that Lemmy uses content negotiation (the same endpoint can return HTML or JSON depending on the headers). I've fixed the caching to take the headers in consideration, so hopefully you won't be seeing JSON responses when accessing the website on your desktop. If you do, let me know!

On a related note, I created a spreadsheet showing the monthly expenses on the instance, and how much we're making from user donations on Ko-fi. The sheets was shared with the current supporters. If you can spare a dollar (or five) every month to help the instance run smoothly please do, anything helps.

Thanks!

Hi, folks!

Since I started lemmy.studio a lot of people have reached out offering help and financial support for our instance. While right now the hosting costs and administration efforts are mostly negligible, I want to make sure the instance can grown in a sustainable way, and I have some ideas on how to do that.

For financial support, I created a Ko-fi page. If you're not familiar with Ko-fi, they're very similar to Patreon, but the fees are optional and they pay creators immediately (not monthly). They also support one-off donations, which is nice. Right now there's a single monthly tier of $1 (though of course people can pay more, if they want).

The current monthly costs for the server, domain, and backups are around $25/month (edit: $45), and we have almost 200 users, so I'm hoping it will be relatively easier to get the costs covered. Any excess income would go towards a reserve to ensure we have a good runway and funds for upgrading the server as we grow. I'm going to create a spreadsheet and share with everyone donating, to keep this transparent.

Second, so far I've been the only administrator in our instance. The volume of reports is still small, usually a handful of spam posts per week, but as we grow we're going to need more people removing spam, banning bad actors, and ensuring we're building a supportive and encouraging culture across our communities. I'm planning to reach out to some "long-term" users that have offered help, but feel free to DM me if you want to help.

(An intermission about culture. This is a music-focused instance, and we're here to share the music we love and the music we make, and also help each other by sharing our process and tools. We're all united by the belief that music makes the world better. So let's put our differences asides, focus on what we have in common, and try to always be kind and supportive!)

Third, I've been also the only sys admin of the instance, responsible for backups and upgrades. Right now the instance is running on a personal team on Digital Ocean, together with other personal projects. My plan is to move the instance VPS to a separate team, so I can invite 1-2 people to share those responsibilities with me. Initially these would have to be voluntary, but I'm hoping that if we get enough support through Ko-fi we can compensate people doing this work.

Finally, for the long run I'd also love to set up a governance model. I'm not sure how this would work, but I'd rather have something where we can make decisions collectively.

Let me know your thoughts!

Edit: I just got my first AWS bill after switching the instance storage to S3, and while it's not bank breaking it caught me by surprise. My monthly bill is around $3-5, last month it was $28.64.

Edit 2: people are migrating to our instance from waveform.social because of malicious activity (DDOS and spurious file uploads), so if you can support the instance please do. I'm planning to move the database to a separate VPS, and maybe look into using CloudFlare to prevent us from being affected, and that will cost more money.

Hi, folks!

Sorry for the latest instabilities in the instance. For some reason we were getting spikes of 100% every now and then, and that would make the instance unstable.

I just finished upgrading to 0.18.3, which was released today. There should be a lot of CPU improvements since 0.18.0, so hopefully the instance will be more stable from now on.

Let me know if you encounter any problems! Since we're usually in the dark during instance upgrades I created a Mastodon account for the instance, so I can post status updates. You can find it here: https://mastodon.social/@lemmystudio

Lately there appears to be some issues with the instance (sometimes it is completely down and I have also been getting a lot of 504 errors) and I was wondering if this is a known issue and when it may be fixed.

are there any plans to upgrade to 0.18.2?

and add me as a moderator after I make a post there

I'm on an instance where community creation got disabled. And from what I see, lemmy.studio is the instance about music, so it is the most appropriate to host this community.

~~wefwef~~ Voyager is a neat mobile-focused client I found that is similar to the Apollo client for Reddit. It is a web app (and probably the best web app I have ever used), so it takes almost no space to install and works on many platforms (currently the interface is styled to look like an iOS native app, but they are planning on making an Android theme).

Recently, they also released mobile apps, which work better than the PWA sometimes.

I appointed myself as a moderator of my community !illegallysmolbirbs@mander.xyz and it shows on the page on Mander but not on lemmy.studio, and I am not able to moderate the community from my lemmy.studio account.

I'm planning to upgrade to 0.18 today and move the storage to S3, so I'll bring the instance down between 5-6pm PDT.

Update: this took longer than I expected. I started at 6pm because of work. I shut down the instance and took a snapshot, then brought it back up and upgraded to 0.18. The upgrade worked fine. I brought the services down and configured the instance to use S3 for object storage. That required migrating existing objects to an S3 bucket, which took quite some time. Then, after bringing the services back up again I got a "Server error" message. Unfortunately I had to stop at 8pm since I had something scheduled. At 9:15pm I was able to bring the services up successfully, and we're back!

Update 2: turns out we hit this bug, and the instance was down around 11pm. I changed the hostname of the instance and now it seems to be working fine.

I am trying to subscribe to the community !illegallysmolbirbs@mander.xyz, and it is not showing up when I search for it. I was able to access another community from Mander earlier, so it is a bit of a strange issue.

I used to be active on the meme subreddits r/pinkfloydcirclejerk and r/beatlescirclejerk, these were active communities with funny memes.

Now that I'm on Lemmy, I feel like I should help recreate one of the subs that I used to enjoy on reddit. I figured those would be the best canidates, because this instance is about music. But idk if it’s relevant because it’s more about music production lol

Also there were a lot of r/(insert band name here)circkejerk type subs, so if i wanna create a community for that sort of thing should it be for a specific band, or just one for dad rock bands in general? idk lol

Edit: I created it! Welcome to c/dadrockcirclejerk!

Here's a quick trick: a bookmarklet that lets you quickly share any page to a Lemmy instance:

Clicking the bookmarklet sends you to this page:

Friendly reminder that today I'm bringing the instance down to do a snapshot backup before increasing memory/CPU/disk and upgrading to the next release of Lemmy.

I'm planning to do this at 8pm PT, and if everything goes well it should be done in under an hour.

Since I'm resizing the VPS this will require downtime, but I'm hoping that in future releases we can upgrade with no downtime.

Edit: I've upgraded to a new instance and we're now running 0.17.4. Thanks for your patience!

We just crossed the 100 user threshold in the instance! 🎉

I'm planning some downtime in the next few days to upgrade the instance to the v0.17.4 release, as well as bump the instance size and add more storage. Since Monday is a holiday in the US I'm planning to do this Tuesday night Pacific time.

[For anyone curious, the instance is running on a $6 VPS from Digital Ocean. CPU usage has been negligible (10%), memory usage has been stable around 80%, but disk usage has been increasing 2GB/day (a lot of it from logs, which I've been pruning). I'm going to double the memory just in case, and attach a 100GB volume to the instance to give us some space to breathe.]

I have been trying to find this out online but have not found the answer. Have been thinking to start a DAW related one on here to help build it up and because why not.

But I did find one or two on other instances. So I was thinking of differentiating it with the name but want to know if I could change it in the future.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

hey folks, we'll be quick and to the point with this one:

we have made the decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post details our thoughts and decision-making on why this is necessary.

we have been concerned with how sustainable the explosion of new users on Lemmy is--particularly with federation in mind--basically since it began. i have already related how difficult dealing with the explosion has been just constrained to this instance for us four Admins, and increasingly we're being confronted with external vectors we have to deal with that have further stressed our capabilities (elaborated on below).

an unfortunate reality we've also found is we just don't have the tools or the time here to parse out all the good from all the bad. all we have is a nuke and some pretty rudimentary mod powers that don't scale well. we have a list of improvements we'd like to see both on the moderation side of Lemmy and federation if at all possible--but we're unanimous in the belief that we can't wait on what we want to be developed here. separately, we want to do this now, while the band-aid can be ripped off with substantially less pain.

aside from/complementary to what's mentioned above, our reason for defederating, by and large, boils down to:

• these two instances' open registration policy, which is extremely problematic for us given how federation works and how trivial it makes trolling, harassment, and other undesirable behavior;
• the disproportionate number of moderator actions we take against users of these two instances, and the general amount of time we have to dedicate to bad actors on those two instances;
• our need to preserve not only a moderated community but a vibe and general feeling this is actually a safe space for our users to participate in;
• and the reality that fulfilling our ethos is simply not possible when we not only have to account for our own users but have to account for literally tens of thousands of new, completely unvetted users, some of whom explicitly see spaces like this as desirable to troll and disrupt and others of whom simply don't care about what our instance stands for

as Gaywallet puts it, in our discussion of whether to do this:

There's a lot of soft moderating that happens, where people step in to diffuse tense situations. But it's not just that, there's a vibe that comes along with it. Most people need a lot of trust and support to open up, and it's really hard to trust and support who's around you when there are bad actors. People shut themselves off in various ways when there's more hostility around them. They'll even shut themselves off when there's fake nice behavior around. There's a lot of nuance in modding a community like this and it's not just where we take moderator actions- sometimes people need to step in to diffuse, to negotiate, to help people grow. This only works when everyone is on the same page about our ethos and right now we can't even assess that for people who aren't from our instance, so we're walking a tightrope by trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That isn't sustainable forever and especially not in the face of massive growth on such a short timeframe.

Explicitly safe spaces in real life typically aren't open to having strangers walk in off the street, even if they have a bouncer to throw problematic people out. A single negative interaction might require a lot of energy to undo.

and, to reiterate: we understand that a lot of people legitimately and fairly use these instances, and this is going to be painful while it's in effect. but we hope you can understand why we're doing this. our words, when we talk about building something better here, are not idle platitudes, and we are not out to build a space that grows at any cost. we want a better space, and we think this is necessary to do that right now. if you disagree we understand that, but we hope you can if nothing else come away with the understanding it was an informed decision.

this is also not a permanent judgement (or a moral one on the part of either community's owner, i should add--we just have differing interests here and that's fine). in the future as tools develop, cultures settle, attitudes and interest change, and the wave of newcomers settles down, we'll reassess whether we feel capable of refederating with these communities.

thanks for using our site folks.

@Beto - feel free to remove this if you feel like it doesn't belong.

Also full disclosure, I am in no way affiliated with this app other than I just discovered it.

Anyway I was looking around for mobile Lemmy clients since mobile is how I always interacted with Reddit. Seems like it's slim pickings for now for fairly obvious reasons, but I stumbled onto Mlem. It's pretty bare bones at the moment, but it seems to have the core feature set. It also looks pretty nice. If you're on iOS and are looking for a mobile Lemmy client, it may be worthwhile to check it out.

Now, 2 posts in a row i see that I can't reply to comments on remote communities.

One was to lemmy.world, and the other one was to programming.dev.

My network tab doesn't show any activity after submitting the comment. Just the spinny SVG icon. So far, I have tried with 2 different browsers.

I tried posting to !mlemapp@lemmy.ml from mlem on my phone, and that worked without issue. So, now I don't know if it's the instances I'm trying to post to, or the web app, or...

Well, guess it's time to introduce myself. I'm ndguardian, a tech guy by day, (very amateur) music producer by night and gamer the rest of the time. Based out of the midwest US. On that note, technically wouldn't I be more mideast? Definitely more on the eastern half of the US, but whatever.

I don't really have a formal music background...I was in show choir in high school, then as of a few years ago decided to get into synthesizers and grooveboxes. I don't release a ton of stuff, though technically I do have two tracks on Soundcloud. I'll link that at the end in case you care to check it out.

I like to think I have a fairly mixed taste in music, with my preferences ranging from Ozzy Osbourne to Hans Zimmer. As for my music production preferences though, I tend to steer more toward ambient and soundtrack-esque music.

Anyway, feel free to hit me up if you have questions or just want to chat.

My Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ndguardian