Shadow

Hello everyone!

I'm going to be taking the server down on Sunday to apply system updates, as well as migrate us to running across multiple lemmy containers.

Currently we do a nightly restart of lemmy / lemmy-ui at 2am resulting in a 2-3 minute outage (visible on our status page). This change will make those restarts transparent so I stop getting alerts on my phone.

I'm current planning on starting this at 11am PST on Sunday Feb 18th and will probably take about 30 mins.

Edit: All done! We've upgraded to postgres 16 as well.

For some reason I've been added as a mod of conan@lemmy.world, which I actually blocked a while ago. I can't seem to self remove myself, maybe a lemmy bug from me being on a different instance.

Can a LW admin please remove me from that community?

Enjoy!

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

I found this super interesting!

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

First off before we get into this I want to make clear that I'm not just throwing shade at the specific instance involved, and I'd also like to avoid focusing on the specific content of thread. I think this is a larger issue that warrants an open discussion, this could have happened with any other instance on a wide variety of thread topics.

Context:

1. Swordgeek@lemmy.ca created this thread asking for people to resist Tucker Carlson being allowed into Canada - https://lemmy.ca/post/12683277
2. A user on a very large instance reported the thread with the reason "Inciting Illegal Behavior"
3. This report was seen and cleared by lemmy.ca admins, as it didn't violate any rules and definitely wasn't inciting any illegal behavior
4. The external admins removed the post based on the report
5. Sworkgeek was DM'ed by automod to let him know, otherwise he would have no idea the largest lemmy user base can't see his thread
6. Swordgeek asked about cross-instance removals here - https://lemmy.ca/post/12724897
7. Swordgeek asked about appeals for the removal here - https://lemmy.ca/post/12789496

There's more discussion around this in the threads linked above, they're worth a quick read.

TLDR: swordgeek made a post asking for political action and someone reported it with a fake reason, and an admin on a large instance removed the post. This removal would only impact their users, giving a largwe lemmy user base a selectively censored view of the lemmy.ca community.

It concerns me greatly that a lemmy instance can act as a censor and push the biases of their admins, on users who are completely unaware it's happening. It also concerns me that a user could manipulate other users, if admins aren't looking closely at the reports they get and just blindly remove things.

IMHO instance admins should not be moderating communities, that is the job of the community mods. Admins should only be involved in urgent + serious reports that are for things like CSAM, dox'ing, death threats, etc. All other reports should be left up to the moderators of the community to deal with.

If an instance wants to block a specific community or defederate then by all means, but instances selectively censoring content in a non-visible way? No thanks.

Can we have some sort of group policy that major instance admins should restrict their moderation activities, to significant rule violations?

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.

For those who haven't seen them, I'm a big fan of these "self watering" IKEA plant pots.

https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/ikea-ps-fejoe-self-watering-plant-pot-black-30117188/

Basically that means there's a reservoir at the bottom, a tube down, and a stick with Styrofoam on the end. The stick floats up when there's water in there, so you don't flood your plant.

Bottom watering is also great way to reduce things like fungus gnats, and apparently is better for your plants.

On top of all this they have shitty wheels on the bottom that make it way easier to move around big plants.

My problem was I have several large plants I want to put out for the summer and hook into my irrigation. A simple solution was just drilling a hole in the bottom, then shoving a rubber cork in it when its inside.

In the summer I just store the cork in the top of the tube (the orange bit).

It's a simple hack but works really well.

The world's biggest iceberg is on the move after more than 30 years being stuck to the ocean floor. The iceberg, called A23a, split from the Antarctic coastline in 1986. But it swiftly grounded in the Weddell Sea, becoming, essentially, an ice island. At almost 4,000 sq km (1,500 sq miles) in area, it's more than twice the size of Greater London.