A few weeks passed since my last update, but MaiionChat is now upgraded to Lemmy instance v0.18.3. The upgrade was quick and seamless in the virtual environment with a smaller test database. As expected, the upgrade for the live site was also quick. Aside from the server's CPU resources maxing out processing the much larger postgres database for only the first 3 minutes, everything else was also seamless. The server continues to run as usual, and utilizes slightly less memory compared to previous versions. Release information can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.3

For the sake of transparency, I would like to mention the customizations and additions I made to the instance leading to the v0.18.3 upgrade.

There was a time when this instance did not have picture previews or open graph images (og:image). This was a decision I made initially to prevent the server's space from running out. Aside from the occasional image links, the text only experience got

[07/14/2023] Reverted back and running v0.18.2 with no problems for the past day. I simply deleted everything pertaining to v0.18.2 while on v0.18.2-rc.2, and then reinstalled v0.18.2. Everything now should be at the latest version at the time of writing this.

Original Title: [07/12/2023] Downgraded From v0.18.2 back to v0.18.2-rc.2

Out of the recent list of issues found in Lemmy's GitHub, this one stood out to me https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3588 because it talks about federation problems with comments. For this instance, I noticed that we were not federating at all on v0.18.2 and that if I were to subscribe to a community, it would remain pending no matter how many times I refreshed the page. To figure out what happened, I immediately went to view the server's logs for Lemmy. It was 1.2GB when I first saw it and grew about 16MB every few minutes.

I immediately knew something was wrong. Before opening it, I compressed it and downloaded it off the server to vi

In light of the recent exploits, I decided to update this instance's security headers. I am in no way affiliated with the following site, but the grade of my instance's security headers can be viewed here: https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fchat.maiion.com&hide=on&followRedirects=on - Feel free to check other Lemmy instances and sites.

Per this post there was nothing in the custom_emoji_keyword and custom_emoji postgresql tables for me to delete. The image is below.

What I did delete in the database were the contents of the activity table older than 2 days. According to the developers, the "activity table...is basically a duplicate of the data in the main tables, and not necessary. It needs to be periodically cleared of data older than maybe 2 weeks or a month". However, the developers ["went with deleting act

Update

As of this post, https://lemmy.world/post/1290412, it is clear that the lemmy.world is working behind the scenes to mitigate the attack on their site. In addition, lemmy.blahaj.zone was known to take down their site to investigate a hack. After weighing the risks, we decided to federate with them once again, but we will also remain cautious.

Until the lemmy.world admin team can give a statement or until the community fully understands what is going on, MaiionChat will temporarily block the largest Lemmy instance.

At the moment, I am busy with other priorities, but from what I quickly gathered, please be careful clicking comments that might look like the ones in this post's image: https://chat.maiion.com/post/68406 as it may be linked to an exploit described here: https://lemmy.max-p.me/comment/100796

The MaiionPostBot remains functional for local instance content, but feel free to continue browsing the All feed. Despite these recent events, b

Knowing that "Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence", "Facebook Spreads Fake News Faster Than Any Other Social Website", and that at least "10 Other Facebook Experiments On Users" were conducted, MaiionChat will block Threads due to the company's history violating MaiionChat's instance rules 3 and 5. We are here because we are trying to make and support something better.

In addition to the reasons above, privacy is very important to us here. We believe that Facebook/Meta, Instagram, and now Threads among other tech giants, have questionable privacy

07/05/2023

Original Title: Instance Is Now Upgraded to Lemmy Server Image v0.18.1-rc.9 & Lemmy UI Image v0.18.1-rc.10 Original Link: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.1-rc.9

After making sure that the new version runs in a virtual environment, I would like to inform the users of this instance that we are now upgraded to the latest images as of this time. The downtime during the transition was 45 seconds.

07/06/2023

Since switching to the release candidates (rc) of v0.18.1, Lemmy has had log in problems/errors on my offline localhost instance. After upgrading to the recently released Lemmy Server Image v0.18.1-rc.10, the issues seem to be fixed. While no errors appear on the live instance, I quickly decided to upgrade the site since being able to log in is a very important feature.

Registration for this instance is now fully open. In addition, the rate limit for registration is now at their default values. As a reminder, registration was temporarily closed due to spam/bot accounts. For more details, please refer to this post.

For release information:

1. https://lemmy.ml/post/1465740
2. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.0

While initially delighted for receiving growth overnight, I found it strange that the users who were signing up were doing so every few seconds and minutes.

All the emails in question utilized the @gmail.com domain and began with common English names followed by a hyphen or underscore with a string of at least 15 random characters.

I highly doubt 309 people would want to use an email address with an extra long string appended to the end of it and share it with other people.

Fortunately, I was able to catch it before it grew into the thousands unlike with some other instances. All 309 accounts have been purged from the database, and the user counter should accurately reflect the correct number of users before this incident. As of writing this, there are only 2 registered users for this instance.

I wish the best for other instance admins who have to deal with more than 309 spam accounts with a legitimate audience. For anyone still reading, particularly admins, I recommend en