Alien.top's raison-d'etre is to create bots and repost things from Reddit.

The instance makes a bot with the same username as the poster from reddit, then makes a bot with the same username as all the commenters, and re-posts each comment.

Every alien.top user in this thread is a bot.
https://lemmy.ca/post/10599153?scrollToComments=true

I did a quick check, and it looks like 138 of the comments are bots.

Apparently, while it's closed for new donations, liberapay is still going to renew existing ones.

A while ago we had a post about a new instance icon. Just wondering if there's any news on that?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7291022

Some months have passed on since the Reddit blackout this June. It led to an explosive growth in Lemmy users, and lots of urgent work in scaling, bug fixes, user onboarding and more. Since then things have calmed down significantly, giving us breathing room and time to get more long-term work done.

As of Nov. 2023, Lemmy is at ~36k active daily users 🥳 (those who have posted or commented within the last month). While user counts are not an explicit goal of ours, this is still a tremendous achievement, and one which we can all be proud to be a part of. It shows that people truly do want alternatives to US tech companies, and will use them if they exist.

Join-Lemmy Redesign

Most recently we've been working on a redesign of join-lemmy.org to provide a better onboarding experience and cater towards new users. This includes:

• A helpful new instance picker to reduce choice overload.
• The instances page is now filterable, based a set of topics and languages, as well as sortable based on activity. The default sort is Random, to encourage people to join smaller servers.
• The apps page now has sections for Android, iOS, and web apps, as well as libraries. Feel free to do a pull request to add any apps that are missing.
• The donate page now shows the total amount of monthly donations across all platforms. More details below.
• The technology used is Typescript with tailwind and daisyUI CSS frameworks.

For server admins: If your instance isn't listed already, you must explicitly add your server topics and languages by doing a pull request to this file.

As you may have noticed, texts on the website are unchanged, and images on the main page are still generic placeholders. We are hoping for your contributions to improve them. For the texts, edit this file. Translations are managed via weblate. Images are located in this folder. If you are good with AI tools, consider replacing main_federation.webp and similar with more colorful images. More main_screen_x.webp images with custom themes or alternative frontends would be nice too. In general feel free to open issues or pull requests for improvements to the site.

Funding Drive

Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

We've known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet's resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Recurring donations from Lemmy users are the most sustainable solution for the future. It also means that we need to worry less about funding, and can focus more on improving Lemmy. And instead of being accountable to an external organization, we work directly for Lemmy's users. While one-time donations are also welcome, they are too unpredictable for long-term planning.

You can find available donation options on the donate page. This page was also updated during the redesign to display current donations and funding goals. If each active Lemmy user donated ~€0.33 per month it would be enough for 3 full-time developers. So please consider donating if you use Lemmy every day. Our preferred donation platform is Liberapay because it doesn't have any payment fees or delays, and is itself open source.

Besides Lemmy's developers, please consider donating to those who develop open-source apps or software for the Lemmy ecosystem, as well as server admins and moderation teams who are the backbone of the Lemmyverse. We would be happy to add donation links for the above to join-lemmy.org as well!

If you have any suggestions in regards to the topics mentioned in this post, please let us know. We also want to use this opportunity to thank the countless contributors who are working on Lemmy now.

It might be cool to get some graphs to see what our growing community looks like. We could also make it an annual/biannual thing and see how things change over time.

We do something similar for our UBC community, and it can be pretty cool to see the results. For example, here is 2018 (we ran one in 2021 as well but haven't added the results of the wiki yet). Running a big official one infrequently seemed to increase participation and get better data. It also allowed us to include more questions without it feeling overwhelming.

If this sounds like a cool idea, what kind of questions should we include? Similarly, what is a good and privacy respecting platform to run it on?

Some potential ideas:

Demographics

• Age range (in 10 year intervals)
• Gender
• Province & Territory
• Urban vs. Rural
• Ethnicity
• Occupation / Career / Field of work

Instance Usage

• How long you spend on Lemmy
• What platform you use (multi-select)
• Other Fediverse services used
• Feedback on the instance or what you want to have added

Hello all and Happy Thanksgiving!

A few people have asked how the server is doing and I've been meaning to post some metrics for a while.

We're running on a "Advance-1 Gen 2" server with OVH hosted in Beauharnois, Quebec. This is a 6 core xeon 2386G with 32gb of ram and 2x 512gb nvme ssd's (raid 1). It's also ended up being pretty overkill for what we need so we may want to consider downgrading in the future, but it's relatively inexpensive ($130/mo) for what it is.

We store image uploads on OVH Object Storage, consuming about 430gb.

CPU peaks at barely 10%:

Similarly most of our RAM just gets used for filesystem caching. The pattern you see is due to a cronjob I have in place that restarts lemmy each night at 3am PT, since it seems to leak memory for us.

A few weeks ago we migrated our pict-rs over to OVH's object storage platform, so our disk needs are pretty minimal.

and with postgres basically just keeping the working DB in memory, disk IO is mostly just writes:

Database throughput shows some interesting activity happening for the past few days, but I just noticed and haven't dug into who/what might be causing this.

but still performance is fine with most queries returning in under 100ms

Lemmy tends to return 4xx errors hence the high error rates from nginx:

Most of our traffic is still ipv4:

Lastly, we use cloudflare as a caching proxy and ddos protection layer in front of our server. They absorb about 64% of our bandwidth usage:

Let me know if there's anything else you're curious about!

Is anyone else getting logged out of their accounts after about a week when logged in on a desktop web browser? (I'm using Firefox) I don't have this issue on mobile with Voyager.

Is there a way of staying logged in indefinitely?

If this is a setting, the inconvenience of needing to re-login gives users an incentive to weaken their security because users will try to make logging in less of a hassle (like disabling 2FA).

As per this Github pull request which is removing it from the Lemmy sign up page, we should defederate from this instance as well.

Lemmy is now upgraded to 0.18.5! This is a much needed bug fix that fixes federation of admin actions.

Unfortunately the server crashed when shutting down nginx (wtf), so there was about 5 minutes of downtime as I hopped onto the console to power cycle it. This is the second time that's happened now, so further investigations will be had =)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/5576046

Link: [email protected]

It's now under new moderation, and we should be more active moving forward. Since a lot of the community recommendation spaces aren't as active anymore, hopefully this space can get things going again.

Come share your communities, from whatever platform you are using!

You can also check out the updated list of community discovery resources here: https://lemmy.ca/post/5581032, or by checking the pinned post.

Cheers :)

For those that were using it, it's now on a different instance after a few instances defederated from feddit.nl

https://endlesstalk.org/post/5491014

Connected with the upcoming server maintenance?

Subject covered in title. Is there way to set this up as a preference?

Hello everyone!

I'll be working on migrating our image uploads from local files over to object store this Sunday starting at about 11am PT.

This may require extended lemmy.ca downtime as pict-rs has to be stopped while the migration happens, but I'm hoping I can keep things running as read-only and run the migration off a second instance.

Updates will be posted here - https://status.lemmy.ca/maintenance/257501

Today, I keep getting the 400 error when browsing in old.lemmy.ca.

The error in question: 400 Bad Request: rate_limit_error. there doesn't seem to be anything here

Seems a bit harsh to neuter the [email protected] community for almost a month because of an automated action?

Not exactly its fault if it just caught and mirrored some spam from Reddit..

EDIT: I see the bot is now unbanned, thanks!

If you don't, Meta will still scrape all the data they can

https://beehaw.org/post/7542139

I got a few posts from them in the communities I moderate, it might be good to keep an eye out for them till they go away / are banned. There are a handful of accounts either posting the links or pretending to be happy buyers.

I don't think anyone will fall for it, but some links are sticking around because the community mods haven't noticed (or they did, but I didn't notice because I got to those posts through the links).

Communities: https://lemmy.ca/c/techsoftware24

Users: https://lemmy.ca/u/softwaresales

https://lemmy.ca/u/AmeliaSophia

https://lemmy.ca/u/olivernoah

Meanwhile, another account is still out promoting murder as of less than an hour ago. Boy, lemmy sure is a great alternative to reddit.

Seriously, what the fuck?

Edit: not shadowbanned, but account lockout/suspension. Would be nice to receive some sort of notice.

I know there's a recent similar-sounding post but I think this is a different issue.

Someone with a racist username DM'd me very graphic porn and insults. Obvious troll is obvious yet I can't find a report button on DMs or the user's profile. Please help.

How do we report communities or users that are problematic on Lemmy.ca?