Server Rundown Part 5

Hello all,

That time of the week again! In case you haven’t already read them:
Previous Parts

TL;DR

Lemmy version update - completed to 0.18.2!
Mobile site - tap away!
Bot updates - cool bot does even more stuff!
Email - we have more emails now!
Lemmy.zip interaction - please interact!
Funding - thanks!
Server update - a few fun graphs!

Lemmy update

At the beginning of the week we attempted to upgrade to 0.18.2 a couple of times, each time resulting in the UI not talking to the backend server software and leaving a blank Lemmy page with no interaction. It appears that mobile apps that queried the backend directly continued to work.

Thankfully we backed up before the upgrade (and have daily backups anyway) and did a restore, but this took upwards of 20 minutes to rebuild. After a couple of attempts of this, we gave up testing in production and spun up a temp dev site so we could run further tests without impacting user exeperience.

Thankfully on the dev site we were able to work out that the issue lay with the extra security measures introduced in 0.18.2 and so we worked backwards (with some external help) to figure out it was an issue being caused by Cloudflare’s Rocket Loader functionality, which was causing a violation with the new security measures. I toggled the switch in Cloudflare and everything immediately started working, and so we applied this to live and everything upgraded straight away.

Not a fun period of time but I look at it as a learning experience!

PS - we have a chat on Matrix where you can keep up to date on whats going on, get the latest updates etc. Anyone is free to join!

Mobile Site

For those not aware, we now have a mobile site hosted on the server. This is the Voyager software (previously known as Wefwef) - It is a webapp that you can install to your homescreen.

You can see the site by going to (https://m.lemmy.zip). While anyone from any instance can use it, its tailored towards Lemmy.zip users.

Bot Updates

Zippybot continues to get smarter. Zippybot will now PM new users to Lemmy.zip upon signup, so they can get all the information they need straight away.

This is a copy of the PM new users will get:

This has allowed us to unpin the “Read Me” post from the Local page so you should have a cleaner browsing experience, and we’ll reserve stickied posts in Local to announcements or short term posts like this one.

The bot is being worked on to help provide advice, suggestions and guidance when users interact with certain parts of the instance, i.e. signing up. We’ll look to expand this to creating new communities shortly, and then we’ll continue to look for ways to help out.

Email

We’ve changed email providers from Brevo (who allowed 300 emails a day) to another provider that allows 300 emails per hour. It also now allows us to send and receive email from other accounts now, and so our new contact email is hello@lemmy.zip. If you have any questions you’re more than welcome to email us at that address.

Interaction

As always we’d like to welcome new users to Lemmy.zip, and you can find some really helpful information here and here.

What I’d really to encourage people to do is interact. There are lots of memes popping up about it and lots of posts explaining the importance. We don’t have a userbase the size of Reddit, so what we need is people to be that core userbase Reddit had and become posters not lurkers.

Lemmy will live and die based on your interactions with both this instance and the wider Lemmyverse so please, if you create an account, subscribe to what interests you and then create posts, upvote, and comment on everything you can!

We have an open community create policy so feel free to create communities on subjects that interest you.

Funding

I’d once again like to thank everyone who has donated towards the upkeep of Lemmy.zip, it has allowed us to expand and improve the experience in many ways.

We’re pretty much sorted, as things currently stand, for the next 10 to 12 months. However we’d like to upgrade the server for better performance, improve page loading times and look to expand the functionality of Lemmy.zip. So if you’ve been enjoying Lemmy.zip and would like to see it grow, please consider donating.

Server update/graphs

Now for the fun part!

This is CPU usage of the server over the last 24 hours. Due to restoring the server within the last 7 days I can’t pull usage graphs for it, but will be able to show these next week again.

Here you can see the image storage stats:

Almost 40 gigs of images!

Here are the Cloudflare stats over the last 7 days:

And here are the visitor numbers: USA has pulled in front of Finland again!

Thats all for now, but if there are any other stats you’d like to see, let us know!

Thanks Demigodrick