Lemmy.ca's Main Community

Hey Admins!

Just because it's been a little while since the links were taken down/de-emphasized, I was just wondering if there's been any movement regarding donations or supporting the Lemmy.ca server and staff?

The new instance icon looks great!

yeah just join Lemmy Canada took me 10 hours to set up the account so I’m here I got a kbin as well I will post that later but hello Lemmy Canada 🇨🇦

Enjoy!

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-01-22_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.3_-_A_Few_Bugfixes

Before joining Mastodon I remember reading about how instance owners could potentially have access to their user’s chats and messages. I don’t think I ever saw this about Lemmy, or at least never looked into that much. Is that also the case here? How much info is accessible by the owners here?

That said I love the service and am happy to be here lol

I've done a quick upgrade to bring us up to 0.19.2, which should resolve the recent federation issues.

Heads up that on 0.19.2 admins also have the ability to now view up/down votes in the UI (rather than having to dig through the DB).

More details here: https://lemmy.ca/post/13038619

Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.

It's been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy's crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from https://the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I'm posting screenshots because they're a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.

Because I'm posting on lemmy.ca, I'll post quite a few related to this instance, but it's probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I'll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison -- biggest server, and original server.

First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.

First observation -- there's some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it's probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:

Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.

As does lemmy.ca, below:

I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.

Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml -- I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.

In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.

And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.

Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn't flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.

I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!

When I click on the login link, I don't see the login section as shown in the screenshot. I've tried logging in using Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. To no avail.

That's it. ♥️

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9631322

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

Last Friday we finally released Lemmy 0.19.0, after a long development time and extensive bug fixing. Read the announcement to find out about the major changes. A few days later on Wednesday we had to publish 0.19.1 to fix a few more bugs that slipped through.

@phiresky fixed the critical bug with outgoing federation in 0.19. Previously he fixed an authentication bug in lemmy-ui which was blocking the 0.19 release.

@dessalines fixed the broken logic for "hide read posts". He also fixed a problem with email login being case sensitive

@nutomic reenabled pushing to crates.io so Rust developers can easily interact with Lemmy. He also made performance optimizations for /api/v3/site and the optimized the Activitypub context sent by Lemmy, reducing the database size and the amount of data sent between instances. He fixed various tests to prevent random failures in continuous integration 1 2

@dullbananas has long been busy improving the database queries for Lemmy, such as fixing a bug in the way different posts sorts are combined, and improving the test cases.

This is our last update for 2023. It was a very busy year for Lemmy, and it looks like 2024 might have even more changes in store. So lets enjoy these holidays, have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

EDIT: Census is now closed. I should hopefully have results out by mid January!

Link here: https://forms.gle/fGP8WiN7MpdVQwsu7

As an exciting year for the instance draws to a close, we would love to learn more about our growing community. We invite all users on lemmy.ca, including those visiting our communities, to fill out this census/feedback form!

Please select "(skip this question)" on any question that you do not want to answer. If you would like to submit your responses some other way, please reach out to @admin@lemmy.ca on Lemmy and we will see what we can do.

There are four sections:

• Section 1: Location
• Section 2: Demographics
• Section 3: Instance Usage
• Section 4: Feedback Form

The results will be aggregated, summarized, and posted on !main@lemmy.ca. The results will not be shared with anyone else for any purpose.

Please comment with any issues or questions. You might remember this from the earlier post: Would people be interested in having an instance census sometime?

~~The census will close on Jan 01 2024~~

Hi Everyone!

We're now running the latest lemmy 0.19 release, you can see more details here: https://lemmy.ca/post/11378137

Note that you will need to re-enable 2FA on your account, all users had it turned off as part of this

You will most likely need to log out and back in for your client to work properly.

Hello All,

Our current admins have busy lives, but we want to make sure we're still on top of growing and maintaining lemmy.ca. As such we've decided to add two new admins to help out. Please welcome @otter@lemmy.ca and @mp3@lemmy.ca. Both have been active with generating reports and keeping the site free from spammers and trolls, and both have experience moderating other communities too. We are confident they will help make the site even better!

Alien.top's raison-d'etre is to create bots and repost things from Reddit.

The instance makes a bot with the same username as the poster from reddit, then makes a bot with the same username as all the commenters, and re-posts each comment.

Every alien.top user in this thread is a bot.
https://lemmy.ca/post/10599153?scrollToComments=true

I did a quick check, and it looks like 138 of the comments are bots.

Apparently, while it's closed for new donations, liberapay is still going to renew existing ones.

A while ago we had a post about a new instance icon. Just wondering if there's any news on that?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7291022

Some months have passed on since the Reddit blackout this June. It led to an explosive growth in Lemmy users, and lots of urgent work in scaling, bug fixes, user onboarding and more. Since then things have calmed down significantly, giving us breathing room and time to get more long-term work done.

As of Nov. 2023, Lemmy is at ~36k active daily users 🥳 (those who have posted or commented within the last month). While user counts are not an explicit goal of ours, this is still a tremendous achievement, and one which we can all be proud to be a part of. It shows that people truly do want alternatives to US tech companies, and will use them if they exist.

Join-Lemmy Redesign

Most recently we've been working on a redesign of join-lemmy.org to provide a better onboarding experience and cater towards new users. This includes:

• A helpful new instance picker to reduce choice overload.
• The instances page is now filterable, based a set of topics and languages, as well as sortable based on activity. The default sort is Random, to encourage people to join smaller servers.
• The apps page now has sections for Android, iOS, and web apps, as well as libraries. Feel free to do a pull request to add any apps that are missing.
• The donate page now shows the total amount of monthly donations across all platforms. More details below.
• The technology used is Typescript with tailwind and daisyUI CSS frameworks.

For server admins: If your instance isn't listed already, you must explicitly add your server topics and languages by doing a pull request to this file.

As you may have noticed, texts on the website are unchanged, and images on the main page are still generic placeholders. We are hoping for your contributions to improve them. For the texts, edit this file. Translations are managed via weblate. Images are located in this folder. If you are good with AI tools, consider replacing main_federation.webp and similar with more colorful images. More main_screen_x.webp images with custom themes or alternative frontends would be nice too. In general feel free to open issues or pull requests for improvements to the site.

Funding Drive

Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

We've known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet's resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Recurring donations from Lemmy users are the most sustainable solution for the future. It also means that we need to worry less about funding, and can focus more on improving Lemmy. And instead of being accountable to an external organization, we work directly for Lemmy's users. While one-time donations are also welcome, they are too unpredictable for long-term planning.

You can find available donation options on the donate page. This page was also updated during the redesign to display current donations and funding goals. If each active Lemmy user donated ~€0.33 per month it would be enough for 3 full-time developers. So please consider donating if you use Lemmy every day. Our preferred donation platform is Liberapay because it doesn't have any payment fees or delays, and is itself open source.

Besides Lemmy's developers, please consider donating to those who develop open-source apps or software for the Lemmy ecosystem, as well as server admins and moderation teams who are the backbone of the Lemmyverse. We would be happy to add donation links for the above to join-lemmy.org as well!

If you have any suggestions in regards to the topics mentioned in this post, please let us know. We also want to use this opportunity to thank the countless contributors who are working on Lemmy now.

It might be cool to get some graphs to see what our growing community looks like. We could also make it an annual/biannual thing and see how things change over time.

We do something similar for our UBC community, and it can be pretty cool to see the results. For example, here is 2018 (we ran one in 2021 as well but haven't added the results of the wiki yet). Running a big official one infrequently seemed to increase participation and get better data. It also allowed us to include more questions without it feeling overwhelming.

If this sounds like a cool idea, what kind of questions should we include? Similarly, what is a good and privacy respecting platform to run it on?

Some potential ideas:

Demographics

• Age range (in 10 year intervals)
• Gender
• Province & Territory
• Urban vs. Rural
• Ethnicity
• Occupation / Career / Field of work

Instance Usage

• How long you spend on Lemmy
• What platform you use (multi-select)
• Other Fediverse services used
• Feedback on the instance or what you want to have added

Hello all and Happy Thanksgiving!

A few people have asked how the server is doing and I've been meaning to post some metrics for a while.

We're running on a "Advance-1 Gen 2" server with OVH hosted in Beauharnois, Quebec. This is a 6 core xeon 2386G with 32gb of ram and 2x 512gb nvme ssd's (raid 1). It's also ended up being pretty overkill for what we need so we may want to consider downgrading in the future, but it's relatively inexpensive ($130/mo) for what it is.

We store image uploads on OVH Object Storage, consuming about 430gb.

CPU peaks at barely 10%:

Similarly most of our RAM just gets used for filesystem caching. The pattern you see is due to a cronjob I have in place that restarts lemmy each night at 3am PT, since it seems to leak memory for us.

A few weeks ago we migrated our pict-rs over to OVH's object storage platform, so our disk needs are pretty minimal.

and with postgres basically just keeping the working DB in memory, disk IO is mostly just writes:

Database throughput shows some interesting activity happening for the past few days, but I just noticed and haven't dug into who/what might be causing this.

but still performance is fine with most queries returning in under 100ms

Lemmy tends to return 4xx errors hence the high error rates from nginx:

Most of our traffic is still ipv4:

Lastly, we use cloudflare as a caching proxy and ddos protection layer in front of our server. They absorb about 64% of our bandwidth usage:

Let me know if there's anything else you're curious about!

Is anyone else getting logged out of their accounts after about a week when logged in on a desktop web browser? (I'm using Firefox) I don't have this issue on mobile with Voyager.

Is there a way of staying logged in indefinitely?

If this is a setting, the inconvenience of needing to re-login gives users an incentive to weaken their security because users will try to make logging in less of a hassle (like disabling 2FA).

As per this Github pull request which is removing it from the Lemmy sign up page, we should defederate from this instance as well.

Lemmy is now upgraded to 0.18.5! This is a much needed bug fix that fixes federation of admin actions.

Unfortunately the server crashed when shutting down nginx (wtf), so there was about 5 minutes of downtime as I hopped onto the console to power cycle it. This is the second time that's happened now, so further investigations will be had =)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5576046

Link: !communitypromo@lemmy.ca

It's now under new moderation, and we should be more active moving forward. Since a lot of the community recommendation spaces aren't as active anymore, hopefully this space can get things going again.

Come share your communities, from whatever platform you are using!

You can also check out the updated list of community discovery resources here: https://lemmy.ca/post/5581032, or by checking the pinned post.

Cheers :)