Server Overview - November 2023

Hi All,

Hope everyone had a good October and enjoyed the spooky season!

Just dropping in again to give an overview of what is happening with the server and what we’ve been working on, along with the usual graphs and stuff 😁

Here’s some communities you might be interested in!

All Things Tom Scott - A community dedicated to the YouTuber, presenter, and media personality Tom Scott!
Data Breaches - Information about data breaches, data leaks, ransomware attacks, and other related stories.
Starfield - Discussion of the Bethesda game Starfield
Game Deals - A comprehensive overview of all the games on sale (or free!) across the PC world.

New Communities

Since my last post, there have been a couple of new communities you might be interested in checking out:

Server Updates

So we’ve been working on a few things over the last couple of weeks, including revamping some of the “admin-run” communities (Gaming, Home and Announcements) with new icons (and a banner!).

We’ve also comprehensively updated our Legal documentation. Previously our Terms of Service was on the Legal tab, but we’ve found this hasn’t been a good way to clearly display information or to add further information to. So we’ve introduced legal.lemmy.zip with all the legal documentation (i.e. cookie policy, terms of service, code of conduct) and this allows us to easily add more as we need, or update quickly and clearly. Please have a look and let us know what you think!

We’ve also been working on a public dashboard for server performance so we can continue to be transparent about how the server is run. A preview of what we’ve got working so far:

We’re not quite ready to have this accessed publicly, but hopefully it won’t be too long!

ZippyBot has also had some fairly substantial updates, including the ability to broadcast messages to all users, adding news articles to the gaming community, and the biggest of all is that Zippy has replaced the slur filter we used to have in place. Now, rather than remove a word on the slur list regardless of context (which stifled discussion and prevented users here from taking part in discussions on external instances) Zippy will report any comments or posts containing a word on the slur list, and the moderator of the community can make a decision on how to resolve that. This should be a much more hands off and flexible approach to handling this.

Interaction reminder (help support the instance!)

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

I wanted to take a moment to encourage everyone to actively engage with our platform. Your participation can take many forms: upvoting content you enjoy, sharing your thoughts through posts and comments, sparking meaningful discussions, or even creating new communities that resonate with your interests.

Your involvement is vital in shaping and nurturing our Lemmy.zip instance. 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.

Together, we can make Lemmy.zip an even more vibrant and welcoming space for everyone. Thank you for being part of our community!

Donations

As always, we’re extremely thankful to people who are kind enough and in a position to donate. You can always see the instance’s financial position on OpenCollective, and what we’re aiming towards. If you do donate, you’ll get your name in the Thank You Thread.

We’re currently in a stable financial position, with around 10 months of funding in the pot. This is a great position to be in, but our ask is that if you’ve been enjoying your time here, please consider a donation. We’d love to be able to save enough to switch to a dedicated server in the future which would improve performance and make the site snappier and more responsive.

Want to help but not in a position to do so financially? Then please remember to interact with the instance! The more users who interact = the better Lemmy.zip becomes!

Server Performance

Time for graphs and some stats!

First is the usual Hetzner CPU usage over the last 30 days:

And second is the Hetzner network stats for the last 30 days:

I’m also including a little sneak peak of the other dashboard we’ll soon be sharing with real time performance stats:

Here’s our image hosting stats:

And here are some Cloudflare stats. For those that aren’t aware, Cloudflare had a bit of a whoopsie the past couple of days, hence why the graphs drop to 0 for a bit! Thankfully Lemmy.zip was fine and continued to work during this.

Overall stats over 30 days:

More detailed overview of traffic through Cloudflare over the last 30 days:

Traffic from regions over the last 30 days:

And finally unique visitor stats over the last 30 days:

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone for being here and helping to build Lemmy.zip into what it is. As always, if you have any questions please put them below or feel free to drop me a message.

Demigodrick