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Back when I started this site around 2020 it was pretty much just me here. Most of the time the new user applications were from ultra lazy spammers peddling penis pills. I realized that all of you have been writing introductions but you don't know much about me so here is somewhat of an introduction.

I'm just a regular guy in the Cleveland, Ohio area who works in tech. I have 3 cats. My hobbies are tech stuff, shooting/guns, gardening, lifting, and to a smaller degree talking about leftist politics. I run this instance as well as I can on my own. Sometimes the site will go down or be slow but you can rest assured that I'm most likely aware of it when that happens. I monitor this site pretty closely.

It definitely feels weird (in a good but anxiety inducing way) to see so many people using the server I set up. Before the influx it didn't matter if the site was down for an hour or two while I worked out a deployment issue but that's not the case anymore. I would like to bring more sys admins on board eventually so if you're interested feel free to reach out.

Glad you're all here!

I've been pretty intrigued by regional communities in the fediverse era, since knowing your users' likely location allows you run your server nearby to maximize performance.

Having just learned about midwest.social, that got me curious -- what region is the server running in?

With just a click, this bookmarklet will redirect you to a foreign community on your native Lemmy instance

It brings your favourite lemmy back home!

If you don’t know what it is, it’s a bookmark that runs a small piece of code that works in all desktop or even mobile browsers

---

javascript:(function(){
var url = new URL(document.URL);
var baseURL = url.hostname;
var pathname = url.pathname;
window.location.href="https://midwest.social" + pathname + "@" + baseURL;
})();

---

Usage

1. Copy the code, replace "midwest.social" in the code to URL of your native instance (for example to "https://lemmy.ca")
2. Create a new bookmark, paste the code from previous step into URL field
3. Go to a non native lemmy community
4. Click the bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar to activate it.

Limitations

• it doesn't work on pages of foreign posts: only main pages of communities

Thought it was relevant.

This is just a post sorry for the disturbance I will delete in a minute.

So I was always a lurker and never uploaded anything, but I want to contribute to Lemmy as we all leave Reddit… can anyone help me upload a video from my iPhone? I’m not sure if it’s an issue with it being large (500+ MB for a 45s video), a wrong codec (the standard on iOS 16.5), or something else. Thanks!

Does the Midwest server not store essentially dead communities from other servers? For example I can find and join technology@beehaw but not iasip@lemmy.ml. I am guessing because the IASIP community doesn't meet some content or engagement threshold. But, I want to post there so it will meet the threshold! It seems like this could create duplicate communities across servers if small communities can't be easily revived.

The option to create a community is right up on top of my screen. That implies to me that it's a thing any of us can just do. I'm new here, though, and I don't wanna make a faux pas or whatever. I have questions.

1. Is there accepted etiquette around who creates a community or when?
2. How general-interest should communities on midwest.social remain?
3. Might creating more communities right now exacerbate the high CPU usage problems in any way?

It's probably actually impressive how little I know about subreddit moderation, to say nothing of Lemmy community moderation. I just don't want to incessantly ask things of a small number of people during an anomalous influx of instance traffic that's probably already demanding enough.

Which... I guess is what this post is. Woof. Sorry. Just wanna be a good citizen!

Just an FYI in case you feel like throwing me a few bucks to offset server costs every month or whatever.

On the midwest.social front page there is a "Communities from our friends:" section that links to communities on other servers.

Rather than linking to those servers, I would recommend that you link to those communities via midwest.social to make it easier for people to join them. i.e.

https://midwest.social/c/science@beehaw.org instead of https://beehaw.org/c/science.

I've been seeing posts of people creating accounts on different Lemmy servers to join communities because they don't understand that they can join any community on any server.

Thanks!

Hello everyone, I recently increased the pool size for the database and ran ANALYZE VERBOSE in it to optimize the queries. I'm cautiously optimistic that it has fixed 90% of the performance problems. Let me know feedback from this point going forward. We're getting a steady stream of applications and now that multiple apps have announced they'll shut down at the end of the month I doubt it will slow down.

I upgraded my server to 2 cores instead of 1, but I'm still seeing a cpu spike for postgres. If anyone has any postgres expertise and wants to help out troubleshooting it let me know.

I upgraded the server from one CPU, to two on Digital Ocean. Let me know if you see any performance boosts.

Anybody else?

Just wondering why the "midwest" icon leaves off part of the midwest.

Hello, you've probably experienced slowness and timeouts recently and I'm going to try to fix it by backing up the DB, blowing it away, and then recreating it from backup. Wish me luck.

Here is the link, let me know if it doesn't work for some reason. I also have the link in the sidebar.

Also, feel free to join Occupy Lemmy and Company at https://matrix.to/#/#occupylemmyspace:perthchat.org

!askmidwest@midwest.social

When you create a community on Lemmy you automatically become the mod of that community. Is that stopping you from creating one? If so, which communities would you like to see here?

Hey all, I'm not sure how to promote new communities so I thought I'd start here. I'm a huge fan of the kitty terminal emulator and didn't find a community dedicated to it, so I decided to create one :) If you're into kitty, terminal emulators generally, or sometimes just like to help people with technical issues it'd be awesome if you stopped by occasionally :)

I like to donate to FOSS projects I use so that other people don't have to. How can I support my home instance? Perhaps I need my eyes checked but I don't see a Patreon link or the like in the main sidebar

@anusgangriseup@midwest.social

As someone new to Lemmy I'd like recommendations for mobile clients. I'm on Android so that's what I'm personally looking for, but feel free to list off any that tickle your fancy for any OS

Curious to know if you're still seeing an influx of new users? I saw Beehaw was struggling a bit from their unexpected growth.