Server Rundown Part 4 (And Threads Poll Results)

Hi All,

That time of the week again!

I’ve decided to combine these topics together as they’re somewhat related and I don’t want to spam people’s home pages with more than 2 pinned posts at any one time.

Previous Parts

TL:DR

Threads Vote - We’ll defederate for now
Lemmy.zip interaction - please interact!
Bot updates - cool bot does stuff!
Funding - thanks!
Server update - bigger server faster website!

Threads (Threxit)

Following the poll for defederation with Threads, the community has voted and has decided that this instance should defederate from Threads.

Therefore within the next few hours I’ll be adding Threads.net to the defederation list, and we’ll keep an eye out in case there is a different URL they use for federation. However, this is not a final say - we’ll monitor how Meta connects to the fediverse and what impact this has on Lemmy, if any.

I am all for user choice/independence, so if the Lemmy devs add the option for users to set their own federation stances then we will look to use that instead of having the instance be defederated in totality.

As a community you get a say in what happens, so if there is strong enough feeling that we want to federate with them in the future, it will go back out as a vote.

It is also important to note that Threads is not yet using ActivityPub and we don’t know if/when that move will happen. This is a preemptive decision.

Interaction

Just a reminder that platforms like this one live or die based on interaction with the content. I’ve seen stats that suggest over 90% of users on social media are lurkers, which ties up closely with our stats too. We have just broken the 1000 registered uses mark (Woo! 🥳) and so we’re looking at ways to encourage participation on the instance. We will also look at how we introduce new users and what tools we can implement to encourage them to introduce themselves and contribute to communities.

Please, if you’re a lurker and you’re reading this, pop into a community and join in with the discussion. Lemmy needs you!

Bot updates

I’ve been working on a “friendly” bot that will allow users to interact with it in various ways, including using it to vote on polls, providing information to new users and anything else I can manage to get working. Thanks to those who helped test out the #score functionality, the bot passed with flying colours.

If you know anything about Python and databases, please hit me up on Matrix.

For anyone interested the git repo is here

Funding

We continue to have some very generous support from Lemmy.zip users. Thank you all who have donated or are thinking about it. As I’ll go into in a minute, we’ve grown to a point where the server needed to be upgraded which produces additional costs.

Therefore if you’ve been enjoying Lemmy.zip and want to see it stick around, please consider donating. The first option is a “one time donation” option and the other three are recurring options.

Anything you’re comfortable sparing will go 100% towards keeping Lemmy.zip running.

I’ve also started to add expenses to OpenCollective, so as the invoices start to roll in, you’ll be able to see what we’re spending on the server.

Server Update

There are two big server updates this week. Firstly, we’ve increased the performance of the server, and secondly we’ve upgraded to Lemmy 0.18.1.

Both of these have brought performance improvements with them, which is great. Since upgrading, we’ve had no 502 errors (where Lemmy.zip goes offline for 5 or so minutes) and we’ve not had to force-restart the server either.

Our server is now “CPX21” with Hetzner for those interested - 3 vcpus, 4gb RAM and we’ve doubled the storage space to 80GB for the Lemmy database etc.

This is the CPU usage over the last 7 days:

This is the storage space on the server now:

Not much interesting has happened with emails this last week, these are the stats though:

Our images storage continues to grow quite nicely too:

And our Cloudflare stats show some lovely figures:

We also appear to be more popular in Finland now than the USA!

1 Month Old

Finally, Lemmy.zip turns 1 month old tomorrow. I’d just like to thank everyone that has been here and contributed to this lovely community, everyone that has donated, anyone that has made a suggestion or provided advice to help grow this instance and special thanks to Sami who has spent lots of his time helping out on the backend and keeping things running smoothly.

Thanks all,

Demigodrick