Hello & welcome to Lemmy.zip February Server Update!
Bit of a quieter one on the developments side, but we’ve had a lot of user growth over the past month. First though:
Communities
We’ve got a couple of new communities. If you enjoy them, give them a subscribe and join in with the conversation!
Server Update
In terms of our usual development, not too much has happened (It’s been a busy month IRL for me!). We put out a call for admin recruitment and got some good applications. I will review these at some point, and will consider the activity of the site vs another admin.
We’ve also seen a large jump in user numbers, which for a while slightly overwhelmed some of the safeguards we had in place. Usually uptime is pretty good but it dropped below 97% in a 24 hour period due to frequent time-outs. Some configs were tweaked and it was mostly resolved, but it does show the appetite for an alternative space!
My main focus has been on improving Zippy to be much more talkative when something goes wrong with it.
I’ve also added some more tools to it, including the ability for admins to issue warnings to users. Given that our only options are to ban someone, I’d rather help people understand what they’ve done “wrong” before issuing a ban. To that end, Zippy will now issue and track warnings. They can only be issued by admins, and there is a log that flags to all admins (for transparency among us) that looks like this:
There isn’t currently a defined rule for when a warning turns into a ban, but once we start to use this more we’ll be able to define these rules. The ultimate aims is that these tools help us to act fairly with all users.
I’m starting to work on additional mod tools for community mods - this will likely be the ability to enforce post tags and the ability for a community mod to set their own “banned words” list. Both tools will have customisable options, i.e. choose between post removal or an automated reply.
Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)
If you’re new to Lemmy.zip - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)
I am sure that long term readers are bored of reading this now, but it is really is true 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.
If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating an account, then come and be part of the Fediverse! 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 is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50) and is mostly funded by the community! (PS yes - the eagle eyed of you will notice this has gone up!!!)
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’ve also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency. I’ve added a link in the sidebar, but you can also click the image below to go there:
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!
Please remember, traditional social media is only “free” to you because they sell your data. We don’t do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.
Graphs (now slightly more pointier)
(all over the last 30 days unless otherwise stated)
CPU usage: (very pointy)
RAM usage: (more bumpy than pointy)
Disk space use: (relatively flat)
Image storage: (lifetime - getting chonky)
Cloudflare stats over 30 days: (can you guess when people wanted to get off reddit!)
Requests:
Bandwidth:
Unique visitors:
Regional traffic:
So thats kind of a quick update for this month.
I am looking for feedback on an idea around the “new user experience” as this was recently a topic on Lemmy. Many people say they bounce off Lemmy as a whole due to the “overwhelming” politics. Many long term users will have probably set up blocks or filters on their feeds, subscribed to a few communities etc and so this is less of a problem, but new users first impressions will turn them away.
Therefore I am looking at the possibility of having new accounts have some “default blocks”, i.e. blocking hexbear and lemmygrad (as two suggestions) upon account creation. All new accounts should receive a PM from ZippyBot upon creation with some information on how to use the site, and so a section on removing these blocks (which can be done in the account settings like a normal instance block) would be added to that PM and I’d probably create a post with specifics on how to do this on the various front-ends too.
This is still very much in the “would this even work” stage, so any thoughts on this are much appreciated.
Otherwise, I’ll be back at the beginning of March for another update!
Thanks all,
Demigodrick
Just had the survey from zippy.
Can’t fault that for community engagement!