Hi all,

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

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

Thanks

Demigodrick

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

Hey all,

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

Cheers,

Demigodrick

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/3740832

turns out I did my math wrong, so it’s a little less than 30 days

July 12th, 2024 @ midnight EDT

https://canvas.fediverse.events

✨ this year’s event also supports the entire fediverse not just Lemmy!

(you have to be able to make/receive text posts, like mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed, etc) (peertube accounts will not work)

you can get update announcements on other fedi platforms with @[email protected] link

chat about Canvas on Matrix or Discord (they’re bridged)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello all,

We're sharing the exciting news that Lemmy.zip has taken steps towards being a publicly traded company. Yes, it's happening.

And because YOU helped make Lemmy.zip what it is today, you now have the opportunity to make us filthy rich (as we mine and sell our user's personal details to AI models) by buying an ownership stake in Lemmy.zip.

We're now opening our pre-registration website for all users who are interested in purchasing shares under our Registered Equity Distribution Direct Investment Track ("REDDIT") or for some lucky long time users, our Special User Collective Keynote Scheme ("SUCKS").

You can find the eligibility criteria for both the REDDIT and SUCKS scheme on our dedicated site, ipo.lemmy.zip

And because we're all about transparency (wink, wink!) we have also created a short video describing in intricate detail how these schemes will work, how the exploitation of the content our users upload will help to make you and us rich, and where you can buy your first private jet with the dividends. Just click here for more details.

To celebrate this occasion, we're working with AI artists to produce exclusive NFTs for IPO supporters and we will be releasing details on this as the IPO progresses.

If you have any questions, please keep them to yourself.

Give us your money,

The Lemmy.zip Admin Team.

Hi All,

By all accounts a pretty smooth transition over to the new server.

I'll be monitoring performance but initial outlook looks amazing. Lots of growing room.

In a couple of weeks I'll try and remember to do a test of a backup live to make sure our backup solution is working, as previously we could rely on Hetzner's cloud backup which was bloody handy.

Please let me know of any issues.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hey everyone,

We've started to hit the upper limit of what our current server is able to handle in terms of performance, and we've noticed its having a performance impact on the site itself.

For example, this is the CPU usage as I type this:

We're going to make the move to a much more powerful server, as we've done all we can on this one to control performance.

If all goes smoothly, I predict a couple of hours downtime while we migrate the database between servers and then move the surrounding services over.

The window is going to be 5 hours, so any posts made in this time will most likely be lost, especially if we have to roll back to the old server.

Once the update is done, Cloudflare should handle most of the DNS issues but you might need to hard refresh the site.

You can keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip for more information.

Please let me know if you have questions in the comments, but I will be doing a full breakdown in the next server update in a couple of days.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hello all,

You may have seen @[email protected]'s latest post regarding his new UI - as I love testing these things out, I've spun up this up at next.lemmy.zip.

Its very new and in active development, and you will be able to join in the conversation at the lemmy-ui-next community.

The new UI is described as:

Lemmy-ui-next is a brand new alternative frontend, built from the ground up with modern and popular tooling - a framework known as NextJS. Lemmy-ui-next has (or aims to have) the following high-level features:

• Open source (AGPL)
• Drop-in replacement for lemmy-ui - same exact URL structure, so all existing links will continue working
• Very plain & minimalistic UI, strongly inspired by other link aggregator sites (of course including the original lemmy-ui!)
• Very basic and "typical" NextJS architecture, to encourage open source contributions
• Fully functional even when JavaScript is disabled (but works better with JS enabled!)
• Optimized data transfer between your browser and the server (filtering out only relevant data from the Lemmy API, caching, memoization)
• Strong focus on privacy and security (all authentication with the Lemmy API is done through secure httpOnly cookies, user IP addresses are not leaked to external image hosts, etc)

Lots to do on this one, so there is an open window of 2 hours until 14:00 UTC.

During this time the site will be down intermittently, there may be backups restored too so any content posted during this window might be lost.

You can keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip for more info during this period.

Following @[email protected]'s announcement (here: https://lemmy.zip/post/11580990) I've spun up a test version of the new Wiki at wiki.lemmy.zip.

Community mods - if you fancy making a wiki for your community, now is your chance!

Its really very barebones at the moment, with no account management and very few tools, so please don't use the same password as you do here and please be mindful that, while I do daily backups, data on this site has a high probability of being lost.

That said, if you have 5 minutes please check it out, create a small article about something you care about, that sort of thing.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Cheers,

Demigodrick

Edit 2: Looks like this migration is going to take some time, so images may be down for a while. Apologies, there are about 1.7 million pics for it to get through so it may take a little while.

The rest of the update is completed and it looks like everything went smoothly.

~~Edit: 0.19.2 update completed, pictrs in progress of migrating so images probably will be not working for a bit.~~

Original:

Hi all,

With the release of lemmy 0.19.2 I'll update the site on Friday, along with the usual backend updates.

Downtime is expected to be very minimal, with any luck only a couple of seconds while the sever reboots.

I will also be updating Pictrs, the software that shows you images, so there will be a period of time where you can access Lemmy.zip but images might not load. It won't affect the functionality of Lemmy.zip short of not being able to view or upload images during this period.

Thanks

Demigodrick

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

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

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

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

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

Lemmy 0.19 has been released!

You can see the full changelog here

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

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

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

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi All,

Small amount of site maintenance to take place, which will include a server restart so there will be some downtime during this 1 hour window.

Site status can be seen on the status page.

Thanks,

Demigodrick

Edit 1: Maintenance is now underway. I'll update this post when complete.

Edit 2: Site upgrade is complete, but some extra work is taking place so the window will be extended for another hour, until 13:00 UTC.

Edit 3: Done!

Hello All,

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

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

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

Thanks

Demigodrick

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

Hi All,

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

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

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

Thanks!

Hello all,

Over the last 48 hours the community has had the opportunity to vote on defederating with Exploding Heads and rammy.site (as an extension of Exploding Heads following its abandonment).

Before we move on to the result, I just want to add that there are no winners or losers here, and rather this is a vote we had to call because the moderation tools for Lemmy users and for Lemmy admins are not yet robust enough, and that in the future we hope that the real best outcome will be to allow users to choose to defederate/block instances entirely.

The results of the poll are as follows:
76% of votes were to defederate, with 24% of the vote to not defederate.

Based on the majority of votes, we've now implemented the block on those instances.

If/when the robust moderation tools are in place in the future, we will revisit this block and look instead to block problematic communities.

I appreciate everyone taking the time to vote, and all the discussion that has taken place around this topic. It has also helped the admin team to better be aware of our responsibilities to yourselves as users of this instance, and our instance's footprint in the wider fediverse.

I also need to mention we've been made aware of illegal content on the burggit.moe instance involving depictions of underage children in sexual acts. Even in cartoon style, these are illegal in many countries, including the UK, and so we've implemented a block on that instance too under the "illegal content" clause in our Defederation Policy. Upon review it appears we had very few (i.e. 1) subscribers to most of these communities on that instance, and so we don't believe this will have any impact on the current userbase.

Hello all,

This is a heads up that this weekend we will be asking the community to vote on defederating with Exploding Heads and Rammy.site, following an increase in their content making its way into our instance and moderation queue.

This content borders on illegal in my/the servers locality (if it was to be clearly iilegal we would have defederated with them immediately to protect the instance) and is usually hate-filled and targeted towards minorities.

So far we've had very little to do with them, but have come across some posts wishing (although not directly stating) harm on trans people and other minorities.

My personal take is the content being generated in those communities is not the content that this community needs to see or be a part of. Given the increasing visibility of this content coming over to us, I feel now is the time for the community to vote.

However, as I have said from the start, these decisions are not mine to take alone, and are for the community to come together to agree on. I never take defederation lightly, and have not defederated with any other instance (except threads) yet. Therefore this is a decision for the community to weigh in on.

In order to protect users here the vote will be held anonymously (we'll release details on Friday), and we encourage discussion to be held on our Matrix space so as to prevent users here being targeted for any views.

The vote will be held at some point on Friday and run for 48 hours over the weekend to give everyone time to vote.

For transparency, I have not reached out to EH mods (and the rammy.site admin is no longer active or moderating their instance) as I don't think this would produce any valuable discussion, they're unlikely to change their instance's purpose for us.

https://canvas.toast.ooo

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

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

Quick rundown of the rules:

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

Event runtime:

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

• Matrix Space
• Lemmy Community

Hey everybody,

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

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

Here are the instances that are joining:

• toast.ooo
• lemmy.zip
• lemmy.ca

Join the Lemmy Community [email protected]

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

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

More info will follow before the start of the event!

Hi All,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy to answer any questions below.