Hello all, welcome to the May server update!

Lets have a look back at what has happened over the last month, and what could be happening into the future.

New Communities

We’ve had a few new communities pop up, please check them out, interact with them, and give them a subscribe!

There are also some existing communities that are looking for mods. Fancy trying out being a mod with a pre-existing community? Now is your chance!

Server Updates

We’ve been on our new server over a month now, with amazing performance, and no downtime (outside of planned maintenance!).

This has allowed me more time to look at the secondary services and less time intervening in restarting a broken server.

To that end, I have started a collection of Mod Tools that are built into Lemmy.zip in this thread. Lemmy doesn’t really come with any tools outside of the report button, so I’ve been trying to build the tools that I think help support mods but also make our communities friendly places to be. I think very early on there was a general consensus that moderation shouldn’t be automated and I’ve tried to stick to that ethos wherever possible. There are no tools that take moderation actions without a community mod or an Admin stepping in to review first.

I will continue to add more tools as I am able to get them tested and running on the site - very soon I’ll have the next tool up on there which allows community mods to set their own “words” for the bot to look out for - for example, you can set it to scan for the word “bread” and every time it finds that word in a new post or comment in that community, it will generate a report for the mod. This allows mods to set their own dictionary of words they don’t want to appear in their communities. (We still have an instance-wide bad words list but that works differently now, and instead lets the admins know on Matrix when a bad word has been detected - these are the sorts of words that we absolutely won’t allow and/or break the law.)

Luckily our application process helps to weed out most of the spammers and bad actors. We don’t generally allow spam/throwaway email addresses (Although I do fully understand why people want to use them, so we do allow email forwarding addresses - I myself use Proton’s email forwarding thing all the time!).

We read each and every application message and do reject those that we feel aren’t genuine (the amount of applications that just say “lemmy in” is wild) - that said, we very much do appreciate those who take the time to write something funny or personal in them, and they do brighten our day!

Ps - thanks to those who have helped to test these tools out and iron out the bugs!

Over the next month I think we’ll see Lemmy 0.19.4 released, bringing with it a bunch of new updates and fixes.

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

If you’re new to Lemmy.zip - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

I just want to let everyone know 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.

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 has now tipped over 50 euros a month ($54, £43) and is mostly funded by the community!

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 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!

I am also looking at future fundraiser ideas (fundraiser committee anyone!) - if you have any ideas please let me know either in the comments, via PM, or on Matrix.

Graph time!

Due to a (now fixed) issue with Prometheus, I can’t show you the full 30 days of the server performance. Instead, the CPU/RAM are over the last 7 days.

Instead, have a bonus image of the current server details as I type this:

Now to the usual stats:

CPU - Yes, we’re not using very much at all.

RAM - I’m pretty happy with this, the performance is exactly where I want it to be.

Image hosting:

Cloudflare overview for the last 30 days:

Requests over 30 days:

Bandwidth over 30 days:

Unique visitors over 30 days:

Traffic: (I don’t know whats happened in Singapore to drive up traffic - popular fediverse server maybe?) Finland is where Lemmy.world is hosted (along with Lemm.ee and Lemmy.zip!) which is why we see so much traffic from there.

So that’s it for a relatively stable April - We’ll see what happens in May!

As always if there is anything else you’d like to see I am happy to add it in, just let me know.

PS - next time I do one of these we’ll be only a few days short of 1 year old!!!

Thanks

Demigodrick