Lemmy.zip Server Update December 2024

Hello and welcome to the Lemmy.zip December Server Update!

This update is stuffed fuller than a turkey on thanksgiving (I’m not American, I have no idea if you stuff turkeys. I’ve seen that one gets pardoned every year though, which seems a touch like psychological turkey warfare) - all the stuff that has happened over the last month is below, and it’s a busy one!

Communities

Take a look at these new communities. If you enjoy them, give them a subscribe and join in with the conversation!

Luanti (Formerly Minetest, a community for the open source voxel game engine)
Retro Gaming (A community based around retro gaming and retro hardware)
Soulslike (A community based around the Soulslike gaming subgenre)
Captain’s Mess (Star Trek memes!)
Shitty Admin (I probably belong on here)

Thank you to all the mods who take their time to foster these communities :)

Server Update

Bit of chunky one, after a lot of waiting we finally saw Lemmy version 0.19.6 released (post) which brought a host of new improvements. In all, it took roughly an hour to apply the update, mostly due to database migrations that run during the upgrade, which prevent the site from running until they’re done. As I alluded to in the linked post above, the site didn’t come back up like it usually does, instead the UI container refused to talk to the database container (everything is dockerised, if you weren’t aware).

The usual “turn it off and back on” method unfortunately didn’t fix this, instead I actually had to do some real work, and read some log files. I noticed that the proxy container was complaining that it couldn’t find the “lemmy-ui” hostname, which was odd because I didn’t think anything had changed there. Sure enough, looking at the lemmy UI container, I could see the hostname was just randomly generated and not “lemmy-ui”. Updating this and restarting the container brought everything back to life.

Potentially this is an artifact left over from when we moved to our current server, because I did everything manually rather than run the ansible script like I did on day 1 of setting the site up. I assume it’s set in there, but we’re so far off the ansible script in terms of custom stuff, it’s quicker for me to just set the containers up manually now. I should probably learn ansible though. It’s on the to-do list.

Anyway, the update worked and all was good. Lemmy 0.19.7 was also released a couple of days later, but as it had no database migration I quietly applied it with minimal downtime (not enough to register on the myriad of downtime detectors I use).

We also now have a working ban email system, which sends an email when a Lemmy.zip account receives a ban from Lemmy.zip, which looks a little something like this:

This has resulted in some high quality appeals, such as:

🙄

You may notice, if you use the default UI or Tesseract that we’re trying out some spotlights for communities. I’ve put the top 20ish most active communities, and I’ll try to update this semi-regularly too. If you don’t see them, they look like this:

Hopefully people don’t mind them - I’m open to feedback!

I believe the next version of Lemmy is planned to be 0.20.0, which should bring with it many requested features, such as private invite-only communities, SSO options, the option to disable private messages if you don’t want, and more. Hopefully the wait isn’t too long, as there are many features I’m looking forwards to using.

Hetzner also did some maintenance on some of their routers which directly impacted on the site, taking it offline for around 20 minutes:

Still, my experience with Hetzner has been flawless from Lemmy.zip starting out on one of their smallest cloud servers, to growing until we hit almost the top of their VPS offering, to now running on a dedicated server.

Finally, ZippyBot continues to be worked on with bug fixes, tidying up of features, and some new moderation features in the pipeline, if I can get them to work reliably.

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 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’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!

Did someone say graphs?!

These are all over the last 30 days unless otherwise stated:

CPU: (That gap is the 0.19.6 upgrade downtime)

RAM: (You may notice that this looks a little choppier than usual, at least if you stare at these graphs as much as I do. That may be because of changes to how Lemmy works, it also may be because I’m ✨testing in production✨!)

Storage: (I need to delete some unused docker images. Otherwise this is fine!)

There are things right now as I type this. Not as you read this though, you’d need a time machine for that.

Image storage: (Lifetime)

Cloudflare overview:

Requests:

Bandwidth:

Unique visitors:

Region traffic:

And that’s it for this month. The next time I write this, it will be 2025. That is, if you’ll excuse my language, fucking nuts. I still remember writing the December 2023 update thinking “how on earth have we made it to the end of the year, this is wild”, and here we are another year later, still going and still (IMO) the best Lemmy instance. I would say this, of course, I am slightly biased.

I want to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who uses Lemmy.zip, who has helped support the instance, and especially those who are regular posters and moderators - without you all, there wouldn’t be much point to this!

I hope you all have a peaceful and joyful festive period, and I hope you get to spend some time with your loved ones.

See you in 2025!

Demigodrick