Welcome to the January 2025 Lemmy.zip Server Update!
As the first one of 2025, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and I hope you all had a lovely time with your loved ones.
There are some quite important changes to include in this update, so please do take a couple of minutes to read it.
Server Update
Lemmy.zip was updated to Lemmy 0.19.8 - Changelog - which was a quick and easy update.
At the same time I switched image proxying on which means, in the words of the lemmy devs:
This prevents deanonymization attacks where an attacker uploads an image to his own server, embeds it in a Lemmy post and watches the IPs which load the image.
You can see exactly what this prevents by clicking here.
This has caused some images to be broken from loading from external websites, whereby you will get the broken image fallback instead of the actual image. Lemmy allows me to bypass proxying images where this happens, so if you do regularly see broken images please let me know which posts and I will bypass it so the images work again.
Lemmy.zip is also now 18+ only. This has applied from the 1st January for all new users, and this will go into effect for all current users from 1st Feb 2025. If you think this will affect you, please let me know and I can support with that. This is in relation to the UK’s Online Safety Act, and the guidance being published by the UK regulator, OFCOM. Unfortuantely the full guidance around what I need to do as a UK citizen hasn’t yet been published, but if the worst happens and we’re forced to implement Age Verification checks (which is my current sticking point - I simply won’t do it) then I have some contingency plans to legally move Lemmy.zip out of the UK. It all seems a bit extreme for a small community website, but that’s the insanity of the UK for you.
So ultimately nothing will change for you all, I just have to be strict about the 18+ rule, as Lemmy doesn’t allow me any granular controls over how NSFW content works on the instance, and I don’t want to turn it off (especially for the communities that use it for spoilers).
This is also a material change to the terms and conditions of the site, and this is notice of those changes (which will also Pm’d to every user, if you haven’t already read it!) which come in to place on 1st Feb 2025. You can read the updated T&cs here: Terms & Conditions.
ZippyBot continues to receive updates, and I am working on adding tools for admins to better manage user moderation (we’d always rather issue warnings than bans, but we need the tools to do this fairly). I am also working on making the bot smarter about recovery on the odd occasion it crashes.
Finally, there is a user survey coming soon! We haven’t done one of these for a while, but the last one helped us to shape some of the stuff we were working on, and many policies today are based on the feedback we received. I’ll post a little bit more when this is ready, but please do keep an eye out!
ADMIN RECRUITMENT!
We have recently appointed a new admin to Lemmy.zip - Druid. Please join me in welcoming him into the role! He also has the distinct honor of being our longest serving user!
On the topic, we’re also recruiting another admin. If you’re interested, please head over to this application form and answer the questions.
There are some requirements. You must have a Lemmy.zip account that is over 1 month old, and it must be regularly used. You don’t need to be a moderator but the experience would help. Also optional but very helpful would be any sort of SysAdmin experience (i.e. linux, ssh, docker) and python experience. Please don’t let that stop you though, we’re looking for someone who fits the ethos of what we want the site to be above all else.
I’ll leave the applications open for a week - until Sunday 12th January.
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!
Graphs/stats/numbers
All stats, unless otherwise stated, are over the last 30 days.
CPU use:
RAM:
Disk space:
Image storage:
Cloudflare:
Requests:
Bandwidth:
Unique users:
Top regional traffic:
That’s it for Jan - see you again in Feb!
And as always, if there is anything else you’d like to see, just let me know.
Demigodrick
P.s. I will include community stuff again in the next one :)
Thanks for staying on top of this, it really is appreciated. :) Happy New Year!
Thank you! 😊
The legal stuff is such insanity, isn’t it? There’s a while bunch of uncertainty over here in the US too. I can only hope for the best.
One of the big platforms I managed had the issue of the founder not making a clear distinction between its moderators and administrators, which is one of the reasons I left it.
One is a public-facing role for people who are great at conflict resolution, while the other is for people who can program or manage behind the scenes. One individual exceeding at both skills is not common. More importantly, relying on someone for their admin skills means you’ll probably fear pushing them away even if they do a poor job as a moderator. This is what we saw with Rooki of Lemmy.world: despite the clear power abuse and the community recognizing that, it felt the other admins had no chance but to keep him because of his help with the platform development, so they even went as far as changing the rules.
Perhaps the issue is not as obvious now, but once the admin has been around and substantially helped you for a while, with a lot resting on their shoulders, it will be impossible for you to not think of that when deciding whether they are doing good as a moderator or if they should be let go.
Thank you for the points and the insight - I do agree with what you’re saying, and I’ll bear that in mind. My absolute priority is to build an admin team that compliment the ethos of the site, and in that vein to continue on with how we currently run it.
Unfortunately Lemmy doesn’t allow us to split the SysAdmin from the site moderation stuff, which would be on my wishlist for the future of development, but our back-end stuff is certainly structured like that.
However, I do need to look to the future and make sure there is sufficient technical skill if I were to be hit by a bus tomorrow, and so it is something I need to weigh up.
One of things I’d like to do is build/train a level of redundancy into the admin team, so that if one person leaves or cannot continue for whatever reason, there is someone who can instead step in to fill the gap. Like you’ve highlighted, some teams can become too reliant on one person for their skills and I don’t want to end up in that position in the long term.
Unlike some other servers, we’re looking for people that support the current community culture and uphold the rules, and not instead change the rules to fit people 😊
Based admin(s).
I really do appreciate this every time 😂
Thanks for your work 🤍🤍
Welcome @[email protected], enjoy the promotion.
And thank you @[email protected] and all the backers for keeping this corner of the internet alive.
Cheers mate ✨🙏🏻
Finns are dominating the traffic by a mile. Good to see.
Nice update!
Thanks Blaze, always appreciate the support <3
I’ve been seeing so many broken image posts on the Voyager app and was wondering what was going on. They could also be older posts too so not entirely certain if this latest update broke them or not. I’ll pay more attention now.
Yeah, please let me know if you see any. I do look out for them but they do crop up on random websites
