Lemmy talk

We turned 2 today and I have renewed the lemmy.radio domain for another year! We've come along way since the great reddit migration. We still see a lot of new users apply weekly.

Some stats!

• 296 Users
• 463 Posts
• 3.68k Comments

I've really enjoyed hosting this service, learning new things, and getting to know everyone.

Thanks for making this place amazing.

73,

w0odl

Check the release notes for all the updates available!

Please let me know if any issues arise,

~w0odl

Lots of great changes on the frontend and backend. Please give the release notes a read.

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

Includes an optional Developer AMA in link provided.

Updates include:

• Fix Youtube thumbnails by increasing the metadata fetch limit to 1 MB #5266
• Also remove private messages when banning user with “remove content” (goodbye Nicole) #5414
• Ignore accept-language header if no site languages are specified, to avoid that users have English disabled and can’t see most posts #5485
• Enable english for users on instances with all languages enabled, to resolve the above problem #5489 #5493
• Only list local banned users under /admin #5364
• Add crawl-delay to robots.txt #3009
• Optimize migrations which were included in 0.19.6 #5301

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

OK, so I'm just thinking out loud here. Lemmy is meant to be a federated alternative to Reddit. As such, it uses Reddit's discussion format (threaded comments, voting, etc) as well as the notion of subreddits (here called communities).

But because it's federated, anyone can create an instance with the right skills and resources. These instances are naturally going to range in specificity. Some are broad in scope while others, like this one, focus on a specific topic.

What I'm curious about is how communities are handled within more narrowly focused instances. From what I've seen from the subreddits I frequented that have jumped to Lemmy, it would seem that an instance is now the equivalent to a subreddit, with Lemmy's equivalent communities being more like sub-subreddits.

Thinking in terms of old-school message boards, an instance is a forum, and communities are subforums. The key difference is that anyone can create a subforum.

I'm curious how this will affect the culture of Lemmy as a whole, how it affects moderation, etc.

Again, I'm just thinking out loud.

Hey everyone!

Just a couple of updates and changes. I have updates the sidebar rules with 5. Community creation should be amateur radio related just to make sure we keep the spirit of this instance grounded in amateur radio.

I have also removed the #lemmy-radio IRC channel from the sidebar. We still have help and discussion chats here in !lemmy@lemmy.radio and on matrix, #lemmy-radio:matrix.org . Also, please be sure to follow on Mastodon: mstdn.social/@lemmyradio.

Thanks and 73,

w0odl

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

~~I will be performing server mainenance followed by a lemmy upgrade Friday, 12/13/2024 @ 08:00 CST~~

Server upgrade was to update us from Ubuntu 23.04 to 24.04. This was needed as 23.04 is no longer supported.

Updates in lemmy 0.19.8 can be found at https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-12-12_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.8

Mostly pictrs updates

The ubuntu upgrade was a big to do but seems to have gone well. As always, please let me know if any other update issues pop up.

73,

w0odl

I'll be making a few support/help updates this weekend and wanted to share them.

• status.lemmy.radio
• Matrix - #lemmy-radio:matrix.org
• IRC - #lemmy-radio @ irc.libera.chat
• Mastodon - mstdn.social/@lemmyradio

These links have been added in the sidebar in the Help section.

73,

~w0odl

Mostly small bug fixes

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-11-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.7

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

This was a BIG one... and a lot of "fun". Click on the version numbers for release information.

0.19.4

This was a major upgrade from lemmy 0.19.3 to 0.19.4 which upgraded postgres to 16. This also gives us federation to a few new 3rd party applications like Wordpress and also lets us have local only communities.

0.19.5

Mostly bug fixes.

0.19.6

A lot of changes all over the place. Faster federation, lemmy-ui updates. Please checkout the release notes to see what new functionality we have!

As always, please let me know if any issues pop up. This was a MASSIVE update.

73,

w0odl

Had a few issues upgrading the Postgres database and pictrs. The instance ran out of disk space during the upgrades and it took the site down for about 3 hours while I migrated us to a new server instance. We're now hosted on:

• 16GB of ram
• 8 CPU cores
• 320GB of storage

... but we are still on Lemmy 0.19.3.

I'll attempt a new update soon, and hopefully with the new update, move our images over to an AWS/Linode bucket because we seem to double in space every 3 months and it's getting expensive.

73,

w0odl

This major update mostly fixes how pictrs, the local image hosting service, saves its data.

As always, let me know if any issues arise. I don't think this will help with any federation issues we have been seeing. But now that we are on the latest and greatest patch, we can rule out versions being our issue for now.

73,

Ben w0odl

This fix should fix some our federation problems hopefully. Please let me know if you see any issues and ESPECIALLY let me know if this seems to fix some of the federation issues we have been having. It may take some time for federation to catch up and I'm not 100% sure older posts and votes will catch up. I'm hoping that going forward, this fix will get us going.

Thanks,

w0odl

I admire @w0odl@lemmy.radio for configuring and maintaining the instance, one can only imagine how much work goes into it—thank you mate for giving us an instance catered to our interests.

Has anyone else had any issues getting engagement or replies to their posts elsewhere on the fediverse when posting from this instance’s account?

Hey everyone!

Life has really gotten in the way of me keeping up with updating and maintaining this lemmy instance. Work and a new family has me slow on updating this site.

While I have no problem paying for it, it would be nice to have another mod who also had interest and experience with maintaining a lemmy instance or any linux experience.

If you're interested, please comment here or message me.

Thanks, Ben w0odl

Over the past week I've been posting and commenting. Some of these just appear to vanish, others seem to be voted up by the entire federated community.

I also see mismatched vote and comment counts across posts authored by me and others.

Is this an instance issue here, a wider lemmy issue, or a PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard) issue?

Certainly many of us use Voyager to access this instance, please update so we can continue to access our community.

Hey everyone!

Just wanted to let everyone know we had a downtime of about 10 hours today. Around 8:00am EST, we maxed out our storage on this lemmy instance. I did get an alert for this, but there wasn't much I could do as I was out of town visiting family for Thanksgiving.

I am very sorry for this. I should have paid closer attention to sizing on our instance. It has been slowly growing over the months and it just sprang up. Again, apologies.

To fix this and hopefully solve any issues down the road, I have moved us to a new server with double the storage, double the CPUs, and double the memory.

This did change our IP address. I have done as much as I can to invalidate and flush caches, and I think we're good to go now. If you do see issues with images not showing, you may need to hard refresh the page and flush your local DNS.

If you have any questions or it seems like the instance isn't working correctly, please reach out to me.

Thank you!

Ben

One of the few subreddits that is still missing an Lemmy alternative is /r/rtlsdr. Can we have such a community here?

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

Wow they weren't kidding. DB size shrank by quite a bit. Curious to see what this does with our CPU usage. Also want to see if our federated instances dropped. QUITE a few instances have either de-federated or have stopped functioning lately.

As always, please let me know if you notice any issues, bad OR good!

~ 73 Ben

This was an emergency update due to a XSS vulnerability with custom emoji. Lemmy.Radio does not have any custom emoji so there shouldn't have been any issue if you have used it the past day.