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

  • Firestorm DruidEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    So, I imagine additional funding is always great to cover the expenses of the server. How much are you currently paying out of your own pockets? Are you “in need” of users contributing right now? Didn’t really understand the graphic shown on OpenCollective, but would definitely like to contribute.

    • DemigodrickOPMAEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      So upfront I put about 60GBP into the server which was roughly 12 months of funding the original server we were on. Since then we’ve upgraded the core server and added the image server. Out of my own pocket on top I’ve paid for the domain for the 2 years, paid for the status server for 12 months and paid for email for 3 years. These are “small” costs in comparison and I don’t mind paying for these myself.

      With the upgraded server the costs have roughly doubled, so the community funding is now helping to pay for that. We’re also looking to upgrade the server again, either to add more cores to the shared vps we’re using or to move to a dedicated server, but a dedicated server is a large jump in cost.

      OpenCollective shows the current funding and the funding over the next 12 months if recurring donors continue their donations. The costs I’ve added are the approx yearly running costs at our current server level.

      I want to be cautious with funding so while the approx yearly amount looks good it’s an approximation on recurring funding and I don’t take that into account. So we’re technically covered for 12 months at this point, but extra funding would allow for a server upgrade for more performance.

      Hopefully that answers the question but let me know if you have any more :)