Lemmy.zip Server Update - February 2024

Hi all, we’ve finally made it through January after what feels like 6 years, and we’re into the second month of 2024!

Here’s a nice little update on what has happened and is happening with Lemmy.zip at the moment.

New Communities

We’ve had a few new communities pop up this month, please check them out and subscribe if you like them!

We’ve also had MaddieTian kindly take over the Playstation community - please check it out and subscribe if you haven’t already!

Server Updates

Since the January update, we’ve applied Lemmy updates 0.19.2 and 0.19.3 which fixed the previous federation bug. All servers on 0.19.3 upwards should have much more reliable federation now.

We’ve somewhat stabilized the site now too, with thanks to locuester - we’ve further tuned the database performance, and in the last week we’ve made some configuration changes to Lemmy’s database (such as a memory leak fix), plus some further configuration changes to the operation of the server which has resulted in no more daily database restarts or the image processing software breaking every day. This is likely a bit of a stop gap until the Lemmy Devs formalize the move to Postgres 16 and the testing can prove that this improves performance. But it is one less thing to worry about for now!

On the topic of images, we’ve now doubled the image upload size from 1mb to 2mb quietly to see if this would have impact in day to day performance or storage. With the improvements to Pictrs (the software the serves and stores images) we’ve actually freed up lots of space in the image storage bucket and so have room to play. Given that we’ve had no issues with image upload sizes at 2mb, I am considering doubling again to 4mb to see what (if any) impact that has on performance. We’d love to allow high quality image uploads so we’ll continue to work towards that.

We’ve also updated our Code of Conduct just a tiny little bit to cover more around downvote manipulation. Downvoting bad content is fine, downvoting all content in a community that you’ve never interacted with before and is in-line with the rules of that community is not fine. Remember, you can always report things you don’t like and mods/admins can take action.

We’ll also be tightening some of the rules up around interactions in remote communities - if we’re receiving mass reports regarding a Lemmy.zip user’s conduct in another community, we’ll consider if that user is breaking the rules of that community and take action ourselves. We’ll post more about that when those changes are finalized.

Remember, you can see all of our legal stuff at legal.lemmy.zip if you’re every really really bored.

Finally, we’ll be releasing a new survey soon so we gather feedback from you all as to how you find your Lemmy experience and we can do better.

We did this back when the instance was 3 month’s old, so I feel now would be a good time to see what has changed and how we can continue to improve.

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.

Donations

I hate banging on about money and I’m not very good at it, but here is the general reminder that Lemmy.zip only exists because of the generous donations of its users.

We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

Therefore, my ask is that if you’ve been enjoying your time here, please consider a donation - it will help keep Lemmy.zip online and all donations go to paying for the server and for the surrounding services like image hosting and email. We have options for one-off donations of any amount, or recurring donations at set amounts.

We’re starting to look at how we reward users with “perks” for donating, although I want to be very clear that this will never detract from the Lemmy experience.

So far we have the name in the thank you thread perk, and we’re also introducing me.lemmy.zip - a place to keep links to various online identities (here’s mine!) or links to anywhere really (as long they abide by our code of conduct obviously!). This is open to any past or present donator of any amount, just drop me a message and I’ll set you up.

We’re on the look out for good perks we can offer, so if you’ve seen any on other websites you think would be a good fit for here, let me know!

Graph time

Here’s some exciting graphs on performance. This is slightly different this time, I’m now switching to grafana for all performance monitoring so graphs will come from there now.

CPU:

Memory:

This one requires some explanation - on the left you can see the spikes where the DB would max out RAM usage and restart itself, causing the site to break/slow down for a couple of minutes at a time.

On the right, you can see the implementation of all our changes, and how memory usage has steadied out.