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I'll be working on upgrading aussie.zone to lemmy 0.19.6 today. All going well disruption will be brief, but there may be some performance issues related to back end DB changes required as part of the upgrade.

I'll unpin this once complete.

I'm making this post directly in response to the extremist moderation in this thread, though I came very close a little while ago to a similar post because of moderation here

Comments that have been removed on the grounds of "No bigotry" include:

There are no good guys in that conflict. Only innocent civilians.

Maybe provide examples? I see nothing that would prevent me from saying that with a straight face.

Gee, I don't know, I vaguely recall a (perhaps minor) news item happening on the 7th, something about a music festival? I may be misremembering though, since this very impartial news site has no mention of it whatsoever.

It's a terrorist organization vs terrorist state. The only good guys are the civilians dying on both sides.

Everyone who opposes genocide, colonialism, and terrorism are the good guys, so neither Israel or Hamas. But Hamas is not Palestine/Palestinians, the same way that Israel/Zionism is not Jewish/Judaism; no matter how much Israel, Hamas, the media, or military industrial complex tries to conflate them all. IMO Israel is more to blame than Hamas as they should know better given a) their history of persecution b) their significantly greater wealth and education, and c) their demographics — more than half of all Palestinians are technically children, below 18.

I don't know what could possibly be less "bigotry" than that last statement. Now, I side pretty much 100% with Palestine in the Palestinian genocide being committed by Israel, but it's not even remotely bigoted to suggest that maybe the killing of civilians, even if done in the name of a good cause, does not make the killers "the good guys" (even if they are "the better guys of the two bad guys").

And in the other thread, they removed comments like:

That's pathetic. That's a pathetic misunderstanding of geopolitics and the nature of modern intelligence infrastructure. You're still in the mindset of "Having SIGINT = bad guys". As if places like Russia, and North Korea would just be magical kingdoms of freedom and accountability if they just didn't have signals intelligence! That's stupid. What differentiates the west (much like what differentiates good media sources from bad) - is accountability, and oversight. Anyways I'll let you get back to your petty fears and misunderstanding the basic lay of the informational and geopolitical landscapes. Maybe if Trump magically wins the election Glenn Greenwald will spend Trump's time in office attacking the Democrats and defending Trump and Russia again. I'm sure you'd enjoy that. The crypto-rightwing are just like that. Aren't you. Semi-pro-authoritarians who don't understand what causes freedom, and think it's something about being a soldier of fortune for a foreign state, or something that comes from "the barrel of a gun". Idiots believing they're freedom fighters popping some imaginary info-bubble. You don't know how lucky you are, or how good you have it, or why... That's your problem, and your weakness.

which were critical of authoritarian states in a mildly impolite way for being violations of their "Be respectful" rule. Meanwhile they failed to remove (and in fact, the comments came directly from an admin) comments that are far more directly disrespectful to their interlocutor, like:

This is wrong on so many levels 😂 If you’re this propagandized, then I’m sure you don’t know what actually happened in and around Tiananmen Square, which by the way is not even censored in China like we’re always told.

Followed by a gish gallop of links.

And

Okay, stay confidently incorrect in the Five Eyes corporate media bubble then 👍

“I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.”

and the especially pathetic disrespectful comment consisting of nothing but:

The admins of that instance are pretty blatantly disregarding their own rules in order to push their agenda. If that shouldn't be grounds for defederation, I don't know what should.

edit: accidentally left a link out earlier

I've spun this up for fun, to see how it compares to the base lemmy UI. Give it a whirl, and post any feedback in this thread. Enjoy!

It could go down at any time, as it looks as though the dev is no longer maintining it...

edit: using this https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym

UPDATE Tuesday 12/11: I've killed this off for now. Unclear of why, but was seeing a huge number of requests from this frontend to the lemmy server back end. Today it alone sent ~40% more requests than all clients and federation messages combined.

Its been 6 months or so... figure its time for another of these. Keep in mind there have been some major config changes in the last week, which has resulted in the oddities below.

Graphs below cover 2 months, except Cloudflare which only goes to 30 days on free accounts.

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

Cloudflare caching:

Comments: The server is still happily chugging along. Looking even happier now that I've properly migrated pict-rs to its integrated object storage config, rather than the bodged up setup.

RAM/CPU are all fine. Storage use is growing slowly as various databases grow. Still a long way from needing to purge old posts, if ever.

Cloudflare is saving less traffic these days, since Lemmy added support to proxy all images. Not a concern, well under the bandwidth cap for the server.

As usual feel free to ask any questions.

I'm in the process of migrating images to a properly configured object storage setup. This involves an offline migration of files. Once complete, I'll start up pict-rs again. Until then, most images will be broken.

All going well this will finish by morning Perth time, and once up and running again may help with the ongoing issues we've had with images.

Over the last few days I've noticed that I'm semi-regularly getting Cloudfare error pages with timeout errors when I go to load a page here. Once the site loads it normally works fine for a while. Sounds similar to Baku's post from a few months ago, if others are experiencing the same at the moment possibly a reboot would help here too?

Leading on from an issue with some lost stickied posts on !environment@aussie.zone , i'm now gathering together useful sources of information in regards the Aus environment.

On !perth i gathered them in the sidebar, so they should remain if i decide one day to remove my account.

I'm currently thinking to do the same thing with !environment@aussie.zone since i've lost those good stickied posts anyway.

My question, probably for !lodion@aussie.zone or !Nath@aussie.zone , is, is there an ability to add drop down menus to the sidebar to enable better organisation of the links.

If you look at the !perth sidebar its already a bit messy and unwieldy, i assume !environment@aussie.zone will only be more so, with the amount of source links likely to be added.

Edit: sorry for all the stuffed links, i'll try to fix them

@unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone's comments were deleted in a thread I was just looking at, and I went onto their profile and it also appears to have been deleted? Anyone have any knowledge about them? It's sad if we've lost such a long-time excellent member of this community.

After some users have had issues recently, I've finally gotten around to putting in place a better solution for outbound email from this instance. It now sends out via Amazon SES, rather than directly from our OVH VPS.

The result is emails should actually get to more people now, rather than being blocked by over-enthusiastic spam filters... looking at you Outlook and Gmail.

I've noticed a lot of broken images around the place and can't quite work out what's happening. It doesn't seem to be a caching issue, at least not on my end, as trying to visit the image URL directly returns a 404.

As noted in a post in the Melbourne daily thread a few weeks ago, there are also a lot of broken community icons about the place. And as I think was raised a while ago, thumbnails seem to be broken most of the time as well.

As an example, here's what the trending communities tab looks like:

The communities page is a little better, but it's about 50/50 as to whether the icon does or doesn't load:

Here's a list of my own posts with missing images I've noticed recently

That last image seems to be super broken at the time of writing. Instead of just returning a generic 404, it returns:
{"error":"unknown","message":"Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image/original/b4df332b-82a9-4ec8-b115-ac1b1b1824b0.jpeg): connection error: Connection reset by peer (os error 104)"}

Additionally, this is how thumbnails on links have been previewing:

Right-clicking and opening in new tab, it seems to be pulling a random pixel from somewhere in the image and then enlarging it and proxying it (500% zoom):

Example URL

But then other URL thumbnails don't work at all, for instance this post on trending:

Which links to Wikipedia, but fails for whatever reason, then tries to load an image called "broken-image-fallback.png", and, ironically, can't even load that (leads to a 404 page).

And some thumbnails on working images don't work, for example this post in c/GardeningAustralia doesn't load - even if I click on the thumbnail (which should normally load the full size/original image), but does work if I click the image URL itself.

One more thing: this new image proxy thing is getting super annoying. I realise it's a Lemmy-side implementation issue, but a couple of sites (Imgur, for example), don't like all the image requests from a single server/IP and end up rate limiting us. This effectively means that Imgur is unusable and no images load.

I actually thought there might have been another mass image purge like last years' incident which required the purging of 48 hours of images, but there hasn't been any announcements about it, and the other broken images dotted around the joint makes me think Pictrs is on its deathbed.

Any ideas what's going on?

Sidenote: image uploads whether in posts or as embedded images within posts/comments seem to fail about half the time for me on both mobile and desktop. I thought this was an issue with Boost again, but it's happening to me on PC as well. On mobile, it usually either returns no error at all, or a 500. On PC, no UI errors are displayed, it just doesn't embed the image, but network tools tell me that something somewhere is returning a 500, likely the image uploader thingy.

I thought the recent patches were supposed to fix the slow federation, but we're still not getting comments or vote tallies through for over a week.

My web dunce question of the week is,

Why would the images url be linked to aussie.zone when the community is blahaj.zone and the poster is lemm.ee?

Is it as simple as the lemm.ee poster might have seen it on aussie.zone and cross posted, or copied over from there?

Edit,

So, just checked this post on the sync app, (using Jerboa for the post), and sync has recognised the image as a URL? I'm confused, i loaded it in Jerboa like i'd normally load a screenshot as an image. Anyway, sorry if the picture doesn't display.

I'm just trying to understand the lemmy system a little better, not trying to highlight a perceived problem.

About to reboot the server, hold onto your hats.

I've been seeing various 5xx error codes (usually 504s, but occasionally 502) sporadically most of the day. It doesn't seem to be a constant thing, just every 5-10 or so loads/clicks, it errors out. I've also noticed it's sometimes taking a while to load. Seems 50/50 whether it takes 1-2 seconds, or 6-10 seconds to load.

Is this something on my end, or is today a lazy Sunday for the server, too?

(I took a screenshot, but I'm getting errors when I try to upload that, too. A classic "ffprobe failed with exit code 1: success")

I'm the developer of Fediverser Project, which is a set of services to make it easy for people on Reddit to migrate to the Fediverse. It lets people use their Reddit credentials (OAuth) to sign up and create an account on a Lemmy server.

It also offers a cool onboarding feature: during signup, we can fetch the user's subscribed subreddits, and we use this information to automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy (or Kbin/Mbin) community. This "subreddit -> fediverse group" map is crowdsourced and people can sign up if they want to contribute. The "main" site also provides a "Find an instance" feature: it can track all the servers that use the Fediverse software and redirect users to their closest instance.

To enable this service, the Lemmy admin needs to add a couple of docker services to their setup and needs to get their own Reddit API key (which is used only for authentication, so well within the rate limits and certainly not incurring any prices).

I'd really like to see aussie.zone becoming part of the network. I believe this would make it faster and simpler to get more people in the fediverse, and I'm willing to provide all the support and help needed to get the "country-based" services getting started with it.

Any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

This is a simple software bug. You see, the way Lemmy federates is that updates to a community only federate to instances that have a user subscribed to that community. If you take a community like !libertyhub@lemmy.blahaj.zone, I'm the only person on all of Aussie Zone who subscribed to it. I know it because when I subscribed, we started getting updates from Blahaj.Zone about that community.

A few days ago, I was mistakenly banned from that community. And this caused Blahaj.Zone to stop sending our instance updates on the community. I spoke with the admin of the community and got unbanned, but the unban didn't federate. The instance will only let us know I'm unbanned if someone here subscribes over there. And I can't subscribe, because this server thinks I'm banned. It's a deadlock. If it wasn't for the ban, I could subscribe and the server would realise there isn't a ban anymore. But I can't, because this server thinks there is still a ban.

When I try and upload an image for my avatar, I receive the message:

{"data":{"files":null,"msg":"ffprobe Failed with exit status: 1"},"state":"success"}

This happened with both a WebP and a PNG file, so I suspect it's a bug.

I can upload images fine here, and when I export my account details it shows a valid image URL for my avatar.

So, as per images below, when you search for an Australian community associated with lemmy, lemmy.world is more likely to come up than Aussie Zone in all i've tried, bar Melbourne our most active community.

My question: Is this a problem we should consider intentional action to correct? And if so what could we do?

Sorry if this has been asked/answered previously, but it just struck me that I hadn't really noticed any impacts of CloudStrike on aussie.zone.

Was wondering if it was a non-event, or maybe there are some war stories with heroes deserving medals!

So, I've just done something that I said I'd be reluctant to do in future without community consultation and blocked an instance.

I don't think anyone will have any issues with it, but I figured I'd let everyone know since this executive decision affects all aussie.zone users.

Hate content

Would people be interested in a community dedicated to discussing lemmy's in general but, specifically aussie zone's growth?

I'm thinking a pretty wide ranging set of ideas including,

• exposure and promotion of fediverse-lemmy-aussie zone,
• discussions on server structures and dispersal of user-bases,
• philosophical discussions on growth as an objective in the case of lemmy,
• discussions on different platforms aussie zone users might want to gather round as the potential use cases of the federated social web start to be explored.

I'm thinking like !fedigrow@lemm.ee , but a sister community that has regard to aussie zone user's corner of the fediverse.

To be used by aussie zone as a general compass setting and project brainstorming community for how we might like to develop, if at all.

Or is !meta@aussie.zone the better place for these sorts of discussions?

There's no communities I think need better moderation, or any that have no active mods (that I know of), but if there is one day, can somebody make a request to have ownership or moderation powers transferred over to them?

Hey all, following the work over the weekend we're now running Lemmy 0.19.4. please post any comments, questions, feedback or issues in this thread.

One of the major features added has been the ability to proxy third party images, which I've enabled. I'll be keeping a closer eye on our server utilisation to see how this goes...

This weekend I'll be working to upgrade AZ to lemmy 0.19.4, which requires changes to some other back end supporting systems.

Expect occasional errors/slowdowns, broken images etc.

Once complete, I'll be making further changes to enable/tweak some of the new features.

UPDATE: one of the back end component upgrades requires dumping and reimporting the entire lemmy database. This will require ~1 hour of total downtime for the site. I expect this to kick off tonight ~9pm Perth time.

UPDATE2: DB dump/re-import going to happen ~6pm Perth time, ie about 10 minutes from this edit.

UPDATGE3: we're back after the postgres upgrade. Next will be a brief outage for the lemmy upgrade itself... after I've had dinner 🙂

UPDATE34: We're on lemmy 0.19.4 now. I'll be looking at new features/settings and playing around with them.