We are now on latest version. We had some downtime related to this. Normally its quick to update, but this time a database update was needed that took quite some time.

It was about 4 months since we had some downtime so not too bad. Hopefully we go another 4 months (or more) until the next one. :)

Sometimes I think people forget how much Lemmy users have incommon, and we just focus on the differences.

Lets look at some introduction letters from users lately who joined this instance:

I'm a technoligist based out of the United States. I want to explore the fediverse protocols, so I'm trying Lemmy and ActivityPub. Also, I jumped off Reddit when they began restricting API access heavily and have been looking for a link-aggregator alternative ever since.

I am an astronomer, nature lover in heart. I am tired of using apps and websites from companies spying on us and owning basically everything. I will be happy to switch from reddit to lemmy. I am curious though how do you know that a bot cannot write such a text.

Great interest in knowledge and competency building through balanced use of technology. I am currently in the process of moving away from the tech giants and their madness.

Reddit sucks now, want a decentralized, not profit driven alternative

I am a concerned

Hi everyone,

We just had some unexpected downtime due to a disk quickly getting full over night... :/

We will adjust the monitoring to start alerting us earlier for disk space running out so we can actually do something about it.

I took the chance to install the latest OS patches and updates now though since the server was anyway down.

Hope you didnt notice the downtime too much!

Just wanted to say hello to everyone new joining the instance lately. Seems like reddits ideas of introducing paywalled subreddits got a few more people to think twice about using that site.

I just wanted to encourage new users to install a good mobile client for Lemmy. The web interface is OK but the mobile apps really take Lemmy to another level by being much faster and more user friendly.

I personally like Boost for Lemmy and Sync but there are many others to choose from. More are linked in the sidebar.

After you do that, make sure to subscribe to many communities. You see a list under the Communities tab and you can choose to subscribe with a click.

You can also go here and see all communities in the entire lemmy universe:

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Me and @[email protected] are trying to keep the bots and spammers out and it goes pretty well so far.

Hope you like Lemmy more than Reddit, most of us here do.. :)

Hi all,

We were getting several reports of people linking to csam content in the signal groups community. We tried to contact the moderator but no response in several days.

Its difficult to moderate this kind of content. Moderators of a lemmy community cannot be expected to visit each posted group around the clock to make sure it doesnt have csam content. Signal groups can change their content at any time.

So sorry to say, it had to be removed. If you were using it, I hope you find some other way to find new signal groups.

We decided to double the server memory and add more cpu, since we were close to running out sometimes.

So if you notice higher performance, you know what the reason is now. :)

Short post, but just wanted to mention it.

We just deployed the latest version of Lemmy 0.19.2 where the github code includes a possible fix for the outgoing federation issues we have been having.

But lets see before we celebrate. Help us test if outgoing federation seems to work now by making comments, posts and upvotes and see if they appear on other instances.

Of course if the other instances are on Lemmy 0.19.0 or 0.19.1, they could have issues with outgoing federation still until they update.

Release notes for 0.19.2: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-01-10_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.2_-_More_Federation_Fixes

Please try to comment and post things now, and see if they federate again.

Hopefully you see your activity instantly federated. I have tried making comments both to instances running Lemmy 0.19.1 and 0.18.5 and they all federate like they should.

Hope you have the same experience! 🥳

As you may have read in other threads, this version of Lemmy (0.19.1) seems to have bugs in outgoing federation on some instances.

As a temporary fix, we have added a scheduled restart of Lemmy every hour. It only takes a few seconds to restart, and the big advantage is that your comments and posts are only delayed up to 1 hour before they federate to other instances. You probably wont notice the restart even.

This will be in effect until a bug fix arrives from Lemmy developers, probably after new years sometime.

Thanks for reading and merry x-mas to everyone. :)

Users of lemmy.today are reporting that outgoing federation of posts and comments stopped to work after the update to 0.19.1 about 19 hours ago.

A restart of lemmy software seems to have made it work again for now, but not sure for how long.

In this version its also common with CPU spikes on a regular basis. I assume its the new federation queue that takes more cpu in exchange for being more reliable. But I see a lot of Postgres UPDATE queries that did not occur in previous version. Also sometimes i see ROLLBACK, which I assume should not be happening.

Anyone else has similar issus with 0.19.1?

Relevant thread: https://lemmy.today/post/4382768

Today we spent some time preparing for the big upgrade, by kicking the Lemmy version up to 0.18.5, merging in the latest changes from lemmy-ansible git repository and cleaning up some disk space on the instance.

So tomorrow at 02.00 am Oregon time we will do the update to Lemmy 0.19.

This is 11.00 am CET for people in Europe.

Hopefully all goes well and we come out the other side with a nice new 0.19 version. Its supposed to take about 30 minutes of downtime if there are no issues to solve.

Wish us luck :)

IMPORTANT: You probably need to log out and log in again to be able to post anything since they reworked authentication in this release.

Hi,

We are planning to install Lemmy 0.19 soon, hopefully in the coming week or so. It's a huge release with many new features, and I personally really like that it allows you users to block other instances if you want to.

You can read about all the new features in the link above.

More info coming in a few days about planned downtime and so on. :)

We just had another unscheduled downtime due to a linux kernel bug.

Yesterday we noticed some issues with the server - mainly that we couldnt stop some docker containers. As you know, we are running some extra user web interfaces for Lemmy and we noticed that they started acting weirdly and had one cpu running at 100% constantly.

I wanted to restart those containers but I couldnt stop them. Found some posts online that this is a bug in the Ubuntu linux kernel: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/43094.

Our stop attempts caused the docker platform to behave weirdly and it started to affect the main Lemmy software, so we did a reboot of the server and installed the latest updates.

We are very sorry for this unscheduled downtime. :/ Did you guys notice weirdness with Lemmy in the last 8 hours or so?

Hi guys!

This weekend we will move lemmy.today over to using object storage for images. We will be serving images from Amazon S3 in the Oregon region (western USA).

The way lemmy software is designed right now, it caches every image federated from other instances. So even if we are small instance, we still have to store a lot of federated images locally on our disk. This leads to disk space running out quickly and we previously had to delete images because of this.

When we delete images, it removes not only those cached images but also user profile icons and banners, as well as community icons and banners. This is why we have some missing images under Communities right now, and also why users have lost their profile pics.

Its been very embarrassing to have to do this, and now we will move to object storage to prevent this from happening in the future. Its much cheaper compared to ordinary disk space and gives better performance for users, so its a win-win. We just need to do a one-

Hi everyone,

As part of cleaning old cached images when the disk went full, it seems also images like your profile picture and banners (if you had those), got deleted.

If you dont mind, would you upload those again? And when you do, you cant upload the same picture. I made attempts myself to upload the same picture, but it needs to be a new picture (not even a rename of the pic works).

Next time I will make a DB query to figure out what pics are local and which are not, and delete only remote ones (cached images from other instances). There is a column in the DB for that, so just need to export a list of remote images and then delete only those.

Despite these growing pains, I think lemmy is still pretty awesome, and there will be tools to make these sort of issues go away in the future. I hear they are working on something for next version already so we will see.

Anyway, enjoy the weekend and once again, sorry for the mess around this issue.

Hi all,

The disk on the instance ran out of space today, due to the way Lemmy software caches images from all other instances. That cache had filled up about 60 GB's of disk, despite us being a small instance with very little local activity.

I had to delete the last 10 days of cached images again, and I plan to delete quite a lot of older cached images as well. The mobile apps seems to not be affected by this (they have a local image cache I believe), but on the web site, this leads to missing thumbnail images.

They are working on a fix for this in the Lemmy software so the disks dont fill up so enormously with cached thumbnails, and as soon as its out, we will install it here.

Hope you guys didnt get too annoyed or sad by the instance being unavailable for a while.

Some bots posted lots of illegal pictures in the https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyshitpost community, and because of federation, those pictures have spread to all instances, including this one.

The lemmy software doesnt have good moderation tools for abuse like this, and the quickest way to get rid of them was to delete all cached images for the last couple of days.

You may see some thumbnail images missing in the web interface, but I personally dont see any missing images in my mobile app. I guess it has its own thumbnail cache.