Hello all!

What a weird month it has been.

The biggest piece of news is the impending closure of lemm.ee. We've been fortunate enough to be recommended by a lot of people so have taken in a large amount lemmeegrants/refulemm.ees.

If you have come from lemm.ee and not seen our welcome post yet, then please Click Here!

Server Updates

Since the closure announcement of Lemm.ee we've taken in over 800 new accounts. We have also been made the default instance of the Voyager app, which has seen some new users directed our way.

This has been great for helping to grow the instance, but has really introduced some performance flaws when a user imports their account settings. For most people this is usually not noticeable, but if you import a very large settings file, it can actually bring the server to a standstill. For example, here's one that brought the server to a crawl for 30 minutes:

![](https://lazysoci.al/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2

Just confirming the upgrade to 0.19.12 was successful, if a bit slower than anticipated.

Apols for the downtime, but hey we didn't have to restore a database this time - great success!

Hi all,

Some scheduled Maintenance so we can feed the hamsters that power the server on their little wheel.

While we're doing that, we'll also update to the latest lemmy version, 0.19.12.

Site will be offline for a small period, and may come up and down during this process.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi All,

As the Fediverse continues to expand, we're looking at other platforms we can run with our ethos - open federation, user choice, and fair moderation.

We've seen lots of talk about Piefed, and the benefits of the platform, such as better moderation, combining multiple communities into topics i.e piefed.zip/topic/cats, and the ability for users to better control their own experience.

To that end, we've decided to run our own Piefed instance, located at piefed.zip (I know, original!)

This is very much still under construction, but we feel is now able to accept new users, should anyone wish to join.

If you're interested please check it out, or feel free to ask any questions!

PS - this doesn't affect our Lemmy instance in any way.

Hello all,

10th June 2025 marks Lemmy.zip's second birthday!

Following the whole Reddit API fiasco in 2023, many of us moved over to Lemmy, and have never looked back. I remember sitting at my desk (it was a Sunday morning, it was probably raining, it was roughly 10am and I was actually supposed to be somewhere else) and buying the domain, wondering how on earth I was actually going to get a real website working.

It has taken a LOT of learning and perseverance, but since then we've created a fantastic community full over people from all over the world, and Lemmy.zip continues to grow and develop.

As I said in last year's birthday post, running a Lemmy instance has it's ups and downs - some days nothing goes wrong and for a large period of this last 12 months we've had a really stable site, which has led to me even at times referring to things as "too quiet". Oh how I miss those days 😭

But even with all the struggles over the last few months

Hello all!

To celebrate Lemmy.zip turning 2 years old, we are once again hosting a small giveaway to say thank you for being here ❤️

We're giving away 3 prizes to 3 lucky winners. This will be 1 x £25 Steam gifts, and 2 x £10 Steam gifts.

The giveaway will be open for 48 hours from 12:00 UTC on the 10th June 2025, to 12:00 UTC on the 12th June

You can enter by making a comment in this very thread! Your comment can say or be absolutely anything you want (within reason!)

Once you've made a comment, you should get a message back from ZippyBot confirming you've entered and a ticket number. For transparency, at the end of this we'll publish the entry list and ticket numbers.

You must be a Lemmy.zip user to enter (comments from anyone else will be ignored!) and you will need a Steam account and be happy to send me your username so I can gift you the value via Steam. Your Lemmy.zip account must have been created before the 9th June 2025.

At the end of the giveaway, I'll lock

Hello to all of our new users.

I wish we could all meet in better circumstances. The closing of lemm.ee is a real blow to the fediverse, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for the lemm.ee admin team. Lemm.ee was a cornerstone of the lemmy community, and set a high bar for moderation and technical performance.

Finding a home on the fediverse can be tough. Whether you're here to lurk, post, moderate, or contribute in your own way, we’re glad you’ve joined us. Lemmy.zip might not replace what was lost, but we hope it can become a lemmy instance where you can feel at home.

Everyone should receive a welcome PM when they sign up to Lemmy.zip from the ever-present dark lord overseer friendly bot, ZippyBot. However, in case poor Zippy has been overworked and forgotten to send the PM to you, here's some helpful information regarding Lemmy.zip!

• All of our policies can be found at legal.lemmy.zip. This includes our Code of Conduct. Please (pleas

Hello all!

Firstly, apologies I missed last month's update. As I will go in to during this month's update, the train has not been smooth sailing, the ship missed the station - for a little while, trying to uncover what has gone wrong has been like unraveling a can of worms that has gone off the tracks.

Because of the length of this update, I'm leaving off new communities for this month, but feel free to pop any in the comments you'd like to share!

Server Updates

So, I'll begin at the 0.19.11 update for Lemmy. I'd planned in some time for the update, and to begin with things went fairly normally, with usual server updates etc. Then it came time to update Lemmy itself to 0.19.11 - however, instead of the ~10 minutes of suggested downtime, it quickly became apparent that something wasn't quite right. The logs gave no indication of anything happening, and after an hour it became apparent that something hadn't worked. With not much to go on, and

Hi All,

For the past couple of weeks, the site has been struggling with performance issues and some of you will have seen frequent cloudflare 502/504 gateway errors, and images not loading properly.

We've done a lot of work in the background to try and pinpoint what the issue is and have started to narrow down things. Hopefully by this point you're not seeing any of the gateway timeouts anymore, although I would appreciate if you do see one letting me know about it.

I missed May's server update because the little time I have free at the moment has been spent trying to fix the issues, however in the next update I will go over what we've done and whats changed - and we've also got a new admin on the team helping to improve Lemmy.zip in the technical department.

In order to continue with improvements, Images will go offline for a period of time while we shuffle things around in the background.

There will also be a server restart so the site will be inaccessible for a short period of

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit

Just wanted to post a quick confirmation that the site has updated to 0.19.11.

I'll be keeping an eye on the site over the next hour or so, but if you notice anything wrong please let me know.

Thanks Demigodrick

Hello all,

Attempt two to update to Lemmy 0.19.11 is now planned in for tomorrow, April 12th at 13:00 BST (that's 12:00 UTC!)

Following feedback from the downtime thread, information can be found on the upgrade in these places:

• Matrix - We have a Matrix space you can join by clicking here. This is likely where I'll be most active during the update.
• Status Page - Following the failure of our old status page to actually detect any downtime, I've swapped to a different status page supplier temporarily while I review the options. Uptime Kuma was great (and free, and self hosted) but let us down. Our status page has now been updated, and I've included the maintenance on there. If there are any unforseen issues, I will add them there.
• Mastodon - I have a mastodon account which you can view by clicking here and I will make a couple of posts here as and when things are happ

Hi All,

As some of you may have realised, the planned upgrade sort of crashed everything, and we had our longest period of downtime since the site began.

This is partly because I had to go to sleep (thanks to a newborn and a job).

The good news is that the backup process worked! We've restored to seconds before the upgrade took the site offline.

The bad news is that federation is likely to be.. wonky.. for a little while. The site may also go up and down while I undo some of the fixes I tried.

Ultimately the issue came down to the upgrade failing (I am not sure why - will be digging into this now the priority is no longer getting the site up) and then the containers not talking to eachother, so the UI wouldn't talk to lemmy, and lemmy wouldn't talk to the database.

I rebuilt the containers, restored the backup, restarted everything, and it's all come back up (admittedly not perfect right now).

Importantly, I want to issue an apology. This isn't what I want for Lemmy.zip, and i

Probably a two hour window to give me time to get things done. There may be an upgrade to lemmy 0.19.11 however that requires some modification of ZippyBot due to changes in the new version.

There will be downtime while the server is restarted, however hopefully this is brief.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hello all,

It's that time of the month again!

Unfortunately we didn't have chance to do an April Fools this year (besides, reality is weird enough in itself) - as mentioned at the end of the last update I was expecting a child, who has safely arrived and is amazing, whilst also ruining my sleep schedule and eating all of my free time!

I am sneaking a few minutes in though, to write this as they sleep!

Communities

We've had loads of new communities this month, so I'll highlight certain ones to keep the list a bit more manageable:

• Language Settings
• Fields of Mistria
• Sim Racing
• Foundation
• Planet Coaster
• Kingdoms Reborn
• TF2 Weapon Ideas
• Automation and Factory Builder Games

Serv

Hello all,

That time of the (shorter) month again!

Communities

We've got a couple of new communities for you:

• Autism Memes
• Mod Tools (I'm trying to consolidate all the available mod-specific tools in one place. This is a local-only community for Lemmy.zip too)

Server Update

A few things happened this month.

Firstly, the smaller things - We updated to Lemmy 0.19.9 which was quick and easy. We also migrated the image database from Sled to Postgres which was relatively easy once it got going, but was not quick. But that piece of work is done now, and should result in tiny performance improvements now we have so many images.

We also implemented the Geoblock of UK IP addresses (more info here). This took a couple of goes to get it how I wanted it to work, but the UI is now blocked to UK IP addresses, and federa

Hi All,

Needing to do some image migration, so for a short while images will be offline. Cloudflare might cache a few for a bit, but new posts won't have them.

Quite rare these days I need to do this level of maintenance but hopefully once complete, the site will be a bit speedier and we'll be in a better position long term.

There's currently about 400gb of images so this work should help alleviate some pressure on the system.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Edit: Quick calc says this could take over 8 hours :(

Edit 2: 6 hours later it's 41% done, so my maths is way out. There's like 10 more hours to go? Sigh.

I just can't believe it. How is it time to turn everything off and back on again already?

Anyway, at 18:00(ish, give me a break) UTC tomorrow (or today if you're reading this tomorrow) I'll be doing just that.

There will be downtime because everything will be off. I expect no longer than 5 minutes downtime, but then if I get transported to an alternate dimension and have to wage war against an alien invasion to get home, things might take a smidge longer.

There will be backups, there will be docker pulls. There might even be space lasers.

Demigodrick