Regrettably, we had to make use of our backup strategy for the first time, and it resulted in losing 2 weeks of data.

Aside from the SOTD posts from the last two weeks, we also lost @[email protected] 's latest mail call. I've saved the picture links manually in case he wants to have access to those photos. here and here.

Luckily, this was just a result of me making a mistake, and not the result of some hardware failure, etc. I thought I was deleting old federated information from other instances to reduce the size of the database, but it turns out I deleted local information, too.

We do have the recent data from the past two weeks saved in a backup file, but in asking around it's near impossible for someone of my non-technical background to merge that information with the old information. So, for now, it's a loss.

Please accept my sincerest apology! Running this Lemmy instance is a big learning experience for me, and I learned a lot from this one! Thankfully the backup system that @[email protected] helped set up worked wonderfully. Had I caught my error a lot sooner we would have lost a lot less info.

-walden

Recently I asked what people thought about how photos are handled on this instance.

I looked into it a little more, and for now the only change that I made is running some software the removes thumbnails on old posts. Apparently there's a distinction in the database allowing them to be found and deleted.

The software is supposed to leave thumbnails alone until they're 3 months old, and then remove them. There are lots of thumbnails, because they get auto-downloaded from other instances.

It didn't make as much as a dent as I was hoping for, but storage went from close to 20GB to around 14.6GB.

I also looked into how much it actually costs, because I've never gotten an invoice (aside from busting through the API call limit once, but I fixed that).

The first 10GB are free. After that I think it's $0.015/GB per month. So assuming 20GB total, that's $0.30USD per month. Totally affordable, so we won't change anything for now.

That's all! Have a good Lather Games if you're participating!

Hello everyone!

TL;DR - Photo storage will continue to grow as time goes on. Maybe we can delete photos after X amount of time to reduce storage space? Maybe we can disable uploads altogether?

We're coming up on about a year since the current management took over this Lemmy instance.

Since then, a lot has changed behind the scenes. We switched to a new host, migrated the pictures to "object storage" which is super cheap, and figured out an auto-posting bot which works ok most of the time.

I'd like to gauge your opinion on photos. Users have the ability of uploading their beautiful SOTD photos to this Lemmy instance. It creates a URL which can be used anywhere on the web. (people can also upload bad photos, copy the URL without creating a post, and share it on the dark corners of the internet. We have a process to hopefully catch that sort of thing.)

Additionally, photos from other instances get stored in our photo storage as things get federated.

Ideally we would be able to delete all of the "fluff", and keep all of the nice pictures that people have uploaded, because honestly it doesn't take much storage for those. Unfortunately we don't have a tool to do that. Instead, stuff just never gets deleted.

Currently, our photos storage takes up 20GB. Last year, if I remember correctly, it was closer to 4 or 5GB.

To be clear - it's dirt cheap. But still, it's money, and it begs the question -- do we need it?

Reddit functioned for years without a built in photo option. People typically used imgur.com.

But wait! Maybe there's another option?

We might be able to keep photo uploads, but it will be temporary. Your nice photo will be deleted from our server after X amount of time. It'll stay long enough for people to enjoy it, but if you try to find it 6 months or a year from now, you won't have any luck.

Does that sound like a reasonable idea to anyone?

There's a tool that does this, but I haven't tested it. I'm not even sure if it'll work, but before I look into it I want to gauge how people feel about that approach.

So, let us know!

• Keep it the way it is?
• Auto delete after X amount of time?
• Disable uploads?

Let us know!

-walden

Hello shavers and shavettes,

Things have been pretty stable on the hosting side of things, which is great! There was a little hiccup with the auto-post bot a little while ago but I was able to get it back up and running without much hassle.

Today I've been working on the picture hosting side of our Lemmy instance. If you weren't aware, you can upload pictures here, and they get saved in Cloudflare S2 object storage. Not just uploaded photos, but thumbnails, etc, get saved there. Currently that uses about 16.5 GB of storage.

One concern I've had is potential abuse of the photo storage. Bad actors can upload whatever they want, including illegal stuff.

I've thought about disabling photo uploads requiring the use of other hosting options like imgur.com, but that's no fun. The other option is what we're going with right now, which is software called "fedi-safety".

I have it up and running on my home server for testing, and will transfer it to the main Lemmy server once I have it figured out, but right now all photos uploaded here have been scanned and deleted if deemed "bad". The tool has a high false-positive rate, because it errs on the side of caution. It's not perfect, but it is preferable to the alternative.

That's all for now. Happy shaving.

-The Admins

Hopefully (really crossing my fingers here) we are entering a period of stability with this little Lemmy instance of ours.

The server has been updated to 0.19.3 which just had some bug fixes compared to 0.19.2.

Since before Christmas our auto-post bot for daily threads has been broken. This was because of changes made going into version 0.19.0. The developer of our auto-post bot is extremely active and usually fixes bugs in a matter of hours. This time took a little longer, but as of right now all systems are go!

Thanks for reading,

• The Admin team

Our quaint little Lemmy instance has been updated to v0.19.2.

v0.19.0 came with some neat improvements like Scaled Sorting and the ability for users to have a personal instance block-list. Unfortunately, it broke federation, which is what allows posts made here to go out and be seen on other instances. Sort of important!

v0.19.1 was quickly released and was supposed to fix that bug, but it didn't. We found a workaround which has been in place through the holidays.

v0.19.2 is also focused on fixing federation, so cross your fingers!

Sincerely, The Admins

The instance has been updated to Lemmy version 0.19.1.

Version 0.19.0 was reported to have an outgoing federation bug, meaning if you commented on something from another instance (lemmy.world, for example), nobody on that instance would see it.

Version 0.19.1 was supposed to fix that bug, so I decided to update. It turns out the bug is still there, so I re-opened the bug report. It's now back in their queue to be fixed.

Unfortunately there's no good way to roll back to 0.18.5 to get federation working again, because there were a lot of database changes going to 0.19.1. Restoring from the backup would mean losing a couple days of posts, and I don't think that's worth pursuing.

In other news, the picture storage that's built in to this Lemmy instance is now hosted in Cloudflare R2 storage. We were running out of room in the small VM that runs all this stuff, so this offloads a bunch of storage (relatively, as it's only 12GB of stuff, 24 including backup). This should be a very cost effective way to continue offering picture uploads. I think right now it should cost around $.02/month, but we'll find out after we get the first bill.

Lemmy (but not our server (yet)) has released v0.19.0. This is a big release with lots of new features, but it also breaks some things so we aren’t going to update until we see how it goes for other instances.

The main “breaking” change has to do with logging in. Once we update the server, everyone will have to log back in. It also breaks the current 2FA implementation, so everyone interested in that feature (yay 2FA!) will have to set it up again.

The biggest potential “break” is with individual app support. Most Lemmy apps have been updated to support the new version, but just in case any of our users are using a non-updated app, that’s another reason to hold off on the release. We’d hate to lose one of our any dedicated users because they have app trouble.

If you feel strongly that we should update right away, let us know in a comment!

First, a quick announcement that for the next 12-24 hours our wiki will be unavailable while the domain record is updated. I trust that this won't bring you too much despair.

A lot has been going on behind the scenes over the past couple of weeks. I figured our faithful users might be interested in the who/what/why, so here's my best effort at explaining the challenges we've had up until now.

Going back to the beginning, when I first became aware of Lemmy, @[email protected] was in charge. He did a great job of setting the instance up, putting rules in place, and recruiting members. The hosting for our instance was done by a company called K&T Hosting, and we were a beta instance, which meant it was free.

Fast forward a bit, and Merikus needed help running the place. Even with K&T Hosting running things, there was still a lot of little maintenance to be done here and there. I dabble in computer stuff, so I volunteered.

A good auto-post bot didn't exist, and the one that Merikus found in the early days broke after one of the Lemmy updates. That coincided with the Lather Games on Reddit during which Merikus, Djundjila, and myself were very busy, and @[email protected] did an excellent job of keeping the thrill alive by posting daily threads. Thanks again!

As I became more involved, I started to think it'd be nice if we had more control over the server. I found a different auto-post bot which "worked", but that was hosted on my little home server, and not a good long term solution. Now we have a nice new bot which is updated quite often and has a very responsive developer.

So the desire to host all of this on our own rented server using Docker has existed for 5 months. Fast forward to the past couple of weeks, and our hosting service started having problems. Every instance hosted by them experienced the same things.

K&T was very active in getting things back to normal, and they have a good plan in place to prevent the same problems in the future.

We like K&T Hosting (hello if you're reading this!), and I've been impressed with the customer service. The hickups of the past week or two are NOT why we decided to change hosts, but it was a catalyst for @[email protected] and I to finally get to work doing it. We simply wanted more control, and saw some benefit to hosting it ourselves.

Now our instance is hosted on a Hetzner server. We have better control over the data and updates, but we aren't immune to problems. For example, yesterday I thought it'd be fun to change the icon for the instance. I uploaded a picture that I stole from @[email protected], and BOOM, Lemmy crashed.

The part of Lemmy that handles pictures did not like whatever I uploaded. I ended up having to manually modify the database, and the instance was down for about 45 minutes while I scrambled to figure it out.

So anyway, I'd like to mention again that K&T Hosting was good to us, did an excellent job hosting, and we wouldn't hesitate to recommend them. Our instance suffered an occasional problem while being hosted there, just like it'll have the occasional problem on it's new hosting platform. It's just personal preference for the Admins to have it hosted somewhere else.

I learned a ton from @[email protected] while migrating the data. From dumping and restoring databases, transferring files between servers, organizing multiple domain names, and making sure everything is secure... I couldn't have done it without his help.

A general overview of how things are managed now, for those curious:

1. Lemmy and associated software is run in Docker, installed on a server running Debian.
2. Portainer is used as a web interface to manager the docker settings, updates, etc.
3. Nginx Proxy Manager handles the security and SSL certificates.
4. The wiki is also hosted on the new server, instead of at my house.
5. The auto-posting bot, called LemmySchedule, is also hosted on the new server instead of at my house.

Thanks for reading,

• walden

Starting at 12:30am Eastern US time, the daily threads will be posted by a new bot called LemmyScheduler. The old bot has been pretty stable lately, but it had some downsides. Rebooting meant I had to manually start the bot, and I would often forget. The old bot also didn't have the ability to pin posts.

The new bot should start automatically even if I reboot the OS, and it will automatically pin the Weekly Questions post. It also has the ability to unpin the post from last week. Scheduling the un-pin is still a manual process, but the dev has said in the future they might add that functionality.

So lets give a warm welcome to our new bot overlord!

Our little wetshaving server has been updated to v0.18.5, the latest stable version. There are no big changes to this version.

It was announced that v19 is around the corner about a month from now. That version will have breaking changes, so they are giving app/bot/etc. developers a month to build backwards compatibility into their services.

When that version comes out, it'll have some interesting updates to sorting, better security, etc. We'll likely give it a few days before upgrading our instance once that version is available to make sure it won't cause too many headaches.

Apparently when we changed ownership/control of the server a while ago, the server lost the ability to send emails. Emails are only used to reset passwords so you may not have noticed the lack of this feature. In addition, there were probably some error messages shown when people signed up for new accounts.

Email verification is currently not a requirement, but it remains an option in case of an increase of spam accounts.

Anyway, we became aware of this problem and fixed it today. Thanks to @[email protected] for his help.

If you've been wanting to update your password but had trouble in the past, give it another try.

Lemmy v0.18.4 Release (2023-08-08)

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

This version fixes the problem of comment context not loading properly. It also fixes a couple other bugs.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

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

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Changes

Lemmy

• Fix fetch instance software version from nodeinfo (#3772)
• Correct logic to meet join-lemmy requirement, don't have closed signups. Allows Open and Applications. (#3761)
• Fix ordering when doing a comment_parent type list_comments (#3823)

Lemmy-UI

• Mark post as read when clicking "Expand here" on the preview image on the post listing page (#1600) (#1978)
• Update translation submodule (#2023)
• Fix comment insertion from context views. Fixes #2030 (#2031)
• Fix password autocomplete (#2033)
• Fix suggested title " " spaces (#2037)
• Expanded the RegEx to check if the title contains new line caracters. Should fix issue #1962 (#1965)
• ES-Lint tweak (#2001)
• Upgrading deps, running prettier. (#1987)
• Fix document title of admin settings being overwritten by tagline and emoji forms (#2003)
• Use proper modifier key in markdown text input on macOS (#1995)

Changes

Lemmy

• Restore markdown quotes after sanitize (#3708) (#3749)
• remove performance-problematic and buggy duplicate site aggregates (#3732)
• remove n^2 part of person triggers, improve community aggregate trigger (#3739)
• Revert “Add controversial ranking (#3205)”
• Omit local instance from federated instances list (#3712)
• add trigram index to search (#3719)
• Federation tests replication round1 - demonstrate absent replication of comment deletes (#3657)
• Make resolve_object not require auth #3685 (#3716)
• Sanitize html (#3708)
• Add controversial ranking (#3205)
• Skip fragile API tests (#3723)
• Enable gzip for reqwest (#3696)
• Dont authenticate user after successful password reset #3714 (#3715)
• Bump version of dependency “webmention” (#3711)
• prevent ordering by comment path without post filter (#3717)
• Update Dockerfile to run process as non-privileged user. (#3709)
• Dont show removed comments to unauthenticated users (release branch) (#3689)
• Add dev profile to strip symbols and disable debug info (ref #3610) (#3611)
• Dont publish releases to crates.io (fixes #3272) (#3664)
• Change logic for determining comment default language (fixes #3451) (#3672)
• Post remove delete federation outbound fix0 (#3613)
• disable rustfmt feature on rosetta-build (#3679)
• Make sure comments are sorted by hot_rank, then score. (#3667)
• Ignore errors when fetching community mods (fixes #3460) (#3674)
• Upgrade activitypub library to 0.4.6 (fixes #3222) (#3675)
• Denormalize community_id into post_aggregates for a 1000x speed-up when loading posts (#3653)
• Fixing hot_ranks and scores to append a published sort. (#3618)
• Use local_site.default_post_listing_type as the initial default listing type for new users (#3666)
• Don’t panic when scheduled tasks can’t connect to database (#3634)
• Add http cache for webfingers (#3317)
• Optimize hot rank updates (#3617)
• Split activity table into sent and received parts (fixes #3103) (#3583)
• work around race condition on community fetch (#3414)
• Make lemmy_api_common wasm-compatible (#3587)
• Check for dead federated instances (fixes #2221) (#3427)
• Fix wrong SMTP port when TLS is being used (fixes #3574) (#3607)
• Add infinite scroll user option (#3572)
• Shrink capacity in RateLimitStorage::remove_older_than (#3536)
• Fix #3501 - Fix aggregation counts for elements removed and deleted (#3543)

Lemmy-UI

• Fixing comment report showing dot. (#1989)
• Make sure comment score color matches your vote. (#1988)
• Allow limited set of markdown in title rendering (#1977)
• Allow selecting from all languages in person settings (fixes #1971) (#1985)
• Separate final comment row + add classes (#1982)
• Fix CSP in dev mode (#1918)
• Fix base.output (see #1911) (#1943)
• Add show/hide button to password fields (#1861)
• Fix start_url and scope (#1931)
• Remove lodash.merge dependency (#1911)
• Set person_id to myId in handleLeaveModTeam (#1929)
• Remove invalid default option from language list (#1919)
• Comment border tweak (#1820)
• Add Toast Messages for Bad Logins (#1874)

First, apologies for the general leadership activity slowing down in the past month. Yes, the 2023 Lather Games are taking up QUITE a bit of bandwidth for the management team, but there is still a lot of interest in keeping this party going!

Some features that worked well in the beginning, like automated daily posts, ran into some problems which have yet to be resolved. That type of thing is on the list to get going again, but not until we get everything else organized.

Behind the scenes a small team has started to work on the future of sub.wetshaving.social. As it stands right now, everything is basically controlled by one person (@[email protected]), and the domain name is owned by another person (hence it's relation to wetshaving.social, the Mastodon instance).

What do we want to accomplish?

• Multiple people having access to the hosting to provide support for updates/downtime.
• Multiple people having access to the domain name to make sure it gets renewed, etc.
• Potentially a different hosting setup (options are keep it hosted where it is now, move it to another hosting platform, or host it in a homelab.
• A different domain name? More research needs to be done on how this would affect accounts, etc.

The hosting is currently done by knthost.com. We were in a beta group which is ending on Nov. 1st. At that point, they will start charging us for the hosting. Financially we are in good shape in the short term, and we're leaning towards keeping the hosting where it is.

So stay tuned in the coming weeks/months. We aren't going anywhere!

After some more research I better understand how federation on Lemmy works, and can give you a step by step guide to be able to expand into communities on other servers, no matter where they may reside, very similar to Reddit.

1. Find a community you are interested in. Go to https://browse.feddit.de to see an index of all Lemmy communities on all instances. Search for what you’re looking for there. While you can browse the community by clicking on it, you can’t subscribe there.

2. Note the community ID and server. On browse.feddit.de, the top line of the box is the community name, such as ws_server_announce. The name is under that, such as WetShaving Server Announcements. The server is under that, such as sub.wetshaving.social.

3. Return to your account at sub.WetShaving.social. Click the magnifying glass. Make sure that the search type is All or Communities and everything else says All. Type !communityID@communityServer such as [email protected]. Give it a full minute before becoming annoyed. If our server has never connected to their server before, it’s doing a first handshake and then will start indexing.

4. If you chose all, some comments may appear. You’re looking for the thing that looks like what you just typed, typically at the bottom of the search results.

5. Click on it and subscribe.

This is really important because the more servers we subscribe to, the more we and they get indexed. So the more people’s comments we can see, and the more people that can easily find us. So subscribe away!

ust a quick heads-up that I federated our server with Lemmy.ml, which is the “big” Lemmy server. What that means is that people who have accounts on the main Lemmy instance, Lemmy.ml, can find and join our community, so it’s possible we may see some newbies come in. It also means that you can use your account here to join communities on Lemmy.ml.

I’m being very careful with this at first because I don’t want to deal with a lot of spam. I reserve the right to turn it off if spam becomes a problem. But hopefully it won’t, and I’ll be able to deal with whatever comes along easily enough. Use that downvote and report button!

At first this is going to be clunky, because our server is still working on federating with theirs. So, if you were to look at a conversation over at Lemmy.ml right now, it would look like a ghost town. But that’s just because our server is in the early phases of federating with them. As time goes on, it will become seamless.

Also, there’s no good way for us to search for communities on Lemmy.ml right now, because we are in the early stages of federation and no one has joined those communities yet. The only way to do so right now is to go to https://lemmy.ml, click Communities at the top, and search or browse. You can then come back here to your account, click the magnifying glass symbol on the top, type into search:

[email protected] and you’ll be able to join it. Again, at first it may seem like there are not a lot of posts, but this is because we are still in this early federation period.

This is also a good moment to plug [email protected], which is what it sounds like, a place to discuss anything involving the server and its administration. Please feel free to join if that interests you.

Thanks again for being part of this experiment!

As previously announced at @wetshavinglemmy@[email protected], the sever was having problems resetting their password, logging in, creating an account, or creating a community.

It appears that all of these issues have been fixed, including the bug where you sign up and the button just spins and it ends up looking like there's something wrong with your internet connection.

Hopefully these bugs will stay fixed, but if they don't please let me know.