Hey all, its that time of the week again with another look at the back end services keeping Lemmy.zip running and what changes we’re looking at implmenting.

If you’ve not read them yet, the previous parts are here:

• Part 1
• Part 2

TL;DR

• Matrix Chat
• Automod Bot
• Please remember to interact with Lemmy.zip
• Funding update

Matrix Chat

We’ve decided to put together a chat room for Lemmy.zip users to come and interact with each other (if they want!). There are various channels there, including a support channel. If there are any issues with Lemmy.zip, a bot over there will automatically notify the channel.

Come and check it out!

Automod Bot

Sami and I have spent the last week trying very hard to learn Python and put some form of automod bot in place. Currently, we’ve managed to get a bot together that will post various weekly chat threads (which should appear tomorrow for the first time!). The bot is @[email protected]. For those interested, he’s using the Pythorhead python library to interact with Lemmy.zip.

Are you a Python dev? Fancy helping out with the bot? Please send me a PM or join the Matrix chat and let us know!

We’re currently nowhere near having it be in place for moderation purposes, however my philosophy around the bot will be that it will never take direct action against a user. Rather, we’re looking for ways for the moderation team to be able to be notified of anything that may break the instance rules, new accounts that begin post spam, that sort of thing. Then a human will have to read and action that report.

New Users & Interaction

Sami has put together a fantastic post for new users. This is just a general reminder for everyone to please interact with Lemmy.zip. Even a comment or an upvote really helps the instance out. Lemmy counts these interactions for each user and this is used to rank Lemmy instances. The more interactions = the more active this instance = better community.

Funding update

We’ve had some very generous support from Lemmy.zip users. Thank you all who have donated or are thinking about it. We’ve now covered the rest of the year in server costs for both the core server and the image server (as things stand!).

We’d like to be able look at upgrading to a dedicated server for more performance power, but with great power comes great responsibility cost. If you’ve been enjoying Lemmy.zip, please consider donating.

Server stats

I’ll start by covering the infrastructure in a bit more detail now we’ve settled down a bit.

We have the “Core” lemmy server, hosted on Hetzner Cloud. More detail on the Server specifics is in Part 1.

We also have a separate “Status” server that is hosting the status page. This is a really cheap, pretty weak VPS running Uptime-Kuma via docker.

All emails are done via Brevo (formerly Sendinblue for those that have used them before). We’re still within the free tier plan (300 emails a day) but it has come close a few times 😅.

Images are hosted on Backblaze via their B2 Cloud Storage Buckets.

Cloudflare is used as a CDN.

The domain is with Google registrar but I’ll be looking at moving this ASAP to Porkbun given that the domain service has been sold to Squarespace.

Pretty graph time

Here is a graph showing CPU usage over the last 7 days. You can kind of see how usage has increased over the last 3 days in line with people fleeing from Reddit.

This shows CPU usage over the last 24 hours:

These are email stats over the last 7 days:

And this is the current usage of the Image storage:

This is the overview of Cloudflare usage over the last 7 days:

This is traffic across countries over the last 24 hours Interestingly, Finland has overtaken USA over the last 24 hours, however over the last week USA has smashed it with over 900k requests, and France in second place with almost 500k requests!

Hope everyone has found this interesting, I will look to try and do these weekly where possible.

Finally, welcome to all the new users! Any questions or anything extra you’d like info on, please let me know.

Thanks Demigodrick