Lemmy.ca's Main Community

I was wondering if there was really a good reason for CloudFlare to be used? I understand Lemmy.ca has dedicated hardware in a datacenter. Seems odd to pipe all our data through a US company as we are in a trade war.

Does Lemmy.ca/fedecan.ca also own pixelfed.ca?

If so, can someone answer if it's possible to have a private account that does NOT federate your data?

The more people use Fedecan services, the more Fedecan will attract bots.

Which means Fedecan will have to do something for users to prove that they are human. When I joined, you guys had a registration prompt with manual review, but I imagine the prompts you gave could be automatically bypassed by an LLM fairly easily.

The naive solution is to do something like collecting government IDs like Facebook tried at one point. But that'll just drive people away who don't trust Fedecan with that info.

What would be your thoughts (admin thoughts, and community thoughts) to implement some 'proof of unique personhood' process with something like Canada Post Identity+? Basically, Canada Post verifies that users are human and is responsible for taking care of PII, and Fedecan just trusts Canada Post to not let the same user register multiple times. If done well, I think 'Canada Post proves that every user account on this site is a unique human' could be a real selling point for lemmy.ca and pixelfed.ca

Full disclosure, I heard about it in a Reddit thread of people complaining about bugs in it while they try to vote in the Liberal party election. But I bet this is just early adopter bugs, and the Liberal party clearly trusts it with their leadership elections.

Regardless, I think proof of unique personhood is a problem Fedecan will have to solve, and a solution through something as Canadian as the post office just seems more elegant than having the Fedecan admins reinvent the wheel.

I realize you guys (admins) are probably quite busy with IRL work and the Pixelfed launch, so if there was interest in this but no admin capacity to investigate further, I could volunteer to reach out to Canada Post and see what they could offer for non-profit use, including what it would cost Fedecan.

Thoughts?

EDIT: for people concerned about "but then CSIS knows which account is mine", an anonymous credential system like U-Prove could be used to prove "1 lemmy.ca user = 1 unique real person", while cryptographically guaranteeing it is impossible to link any particular lemmy.ca user to any particular human identity.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39752087, from the [email protected] community

TOTAL USERS is the number of users that registered on pixelfed.ca

TOTAL POSTS is the number of posts from all instances that are now accessible on pixelfed.ca

I was just taking a peek at the various frontends supported by lemmy.ca, and I was wondering if the admins here have any insight into their respective use?

I'm going to bet the default (lemmy-ui) is most popular, but do any of the other frontends get far-and-away more use than the other alternatives? Has there been any trends up or down? Just thought I'd ask.

As an aside, if any of the frontend developers happen across this post, well done to all of you! I can immediately see the appeal of each, so each niche is being filled darn well!

Edit: to be clear, I'm talking about the frontends listed on the lemmy.ca main sidebar.

After moving in to our new server last month, our next large project is to set up some new Fediverse platforms. One of the most requested of those was Pixelfed, which is an image sharing platform.

You should be able to sign up here: pixelfed.ca

As with any new instance, some issues are to be expected and while we've done some testing already, please bear with us as things get going. For any support related issues with pixelfed.ca, please post in the new [email protected] community

I've been posting the link to lemmy.ca wherever I can, like over at YouTube for instance... and I wanted to make sure that's ok before finding out it's not for some reason.

So, is that ok?

Do you provide donation receipts so that the donor may use it for tax credits in Canada?

Couldnt find any mention of tax receipts on fedecan.ca

Sorry about the brief downtime there!

Wasn't related to the new users or high load, but was a combination of two problems:

1. Our fw02 took over for some reason TBD
2. Opnsense isn't keeping haproxy configs in sync and fw02 had a broken config

Still digging into the root cause, but shouldn't be any more issues =)

Hexbear lost their domain (It's currently up for auction), and have moved to chapo.chat

Pretty sure we're defederated from hexbear, thought id pass on the new name to be re-defederated if it hasn't been already.

Just a heads up that we're now running on lemmy 0.19.9.

Change log here - https://lemmy.ca/post/38913840

Sorry about the ~20 minutes of downtime there!

I was working on migrating the lemmy.ca domain out of a personal cloudflare account, into a shared one for Fedecan. Missed one little setting that took me far too long to track down!

I can't be the only reddit migrant who often instinctually goes to a given community by typing /r/community, only to be 404d. If the /r/ path isn't being used for anything else, is it possible to have it dynamically redirect to /c/ instead?

I was going to post this in /c/Canada, but figured I'd post it here first since we'd need someone to officially represent Lemmy.ca/Fedecan to make it happen and organize a sort of group-pledge from the lemmy.ca community.

They have tiers for a $500 Gold Sponsor, $1000 Diamond Sponsor, and $2500 Platinum Sponsor to get a logo on their website sponsor page. I figured aiming for $500 is reasonable.

Unfortunately the pictrs database migration yesterday seems to have skipped migrating a ton of data.

Since cloudflare is caching our images, almost nobody noticed. We've now been running on the new instance for over a day, collecting new images into a new incomplete db. Fun.

I now have two copies of pictrs running, one with the postgres db and one with the legacy sled-db. Requests that fail against our updated one, will be retried against the legacy one. This should result in all images working properly again for now, while I figure out a better long term solution.

Please let me know if you still see any issues with images loading!

I'm curious if anyone here actually finds value in the reddit posts brought over by lemmit.online, since I'd like to defederate from it otherwise.

It feels actively harmful to lemmy, since so many of the posts it brings over are questions that the original poster will never see. It encourages a conversation that will never happen, so if someone does reply they're going to feel disengaged.

The bot rarely gets any upvotes or engagement, and I suspect a majority of people (like myself) have just blocked it. TBH I forgot it existed until Tesseract showed me its posts again.

Hi everyone!

Tesseract is now available as an alternative front end at https://tess.lemmy.ca/

Hello everyone!

I'll be taking the site down for two maintenance windows this week to complete our server migration.

• Weds Jan 29th - 09:00 - 11:00 PT (12:00 - 14:00 ET)
• Thurs Jan 30th - 09:00 - 11:00 PT (12:00 - 14:00 ET)

During the first window I'll be migrating us from OVH to our new dedicated hardware. After this migration there will likely be some temporarily broken images, as it takes approximately 8 hours to resync our object storage from OVH.

This is a major change and despite my testing, may have some unintended side effects. If you run into any problems that aren't just a broken image, please let us know.

The second maintenance window is to migrate our pict-rs database from it's local sled-db into our primary postgres DB. This is a much smaller change but since pict-rs checks every image as it goes through them, it takes about 1.5 hours.

As usual, you can check https://status.lemmy.ca/ for updates.

Translation: To stay on X or not? Some elected officials think of leaving Elon Musk's platform.

What the article is saying is basically that a lot of the provincial MPs in Québec are thinking of leaving for something else. One of which, the health minister Christian Dubé, has already created an account on BlueSky.

We need to promote fediverse alternatives to our elected officials right now since everyone is worried about the control of information on Meta/X & Co.

Hello all! I am new to Lemmy.ca and really new to this whole concept. I was poking around the community list and thought of a couple that I would have liked to see (Canada related). Is there a procedure specifically for creating new communities here, or do I just go ahead if I'm sure it doesn't exist? I don't want to step on any toes.

Hello everyone, we're long overdue for an update on how things have been going!

Finances

Since we started accepting donations back in July we've received a total of $1350, as well as $1707 in older donations from smorks. We haven't had any expenses other than OVH (approx $155/mo) since then, leaving us $2152 in the bank.

We still owe TruckBC $1980 for the period he was covering hosting, and I've contributed $525 as well (mostly non-profit registration related stuff, plus domain renewals). We haven't yet discussed reimbursing either of us, we're both happy to build up a contingency fund for a while.

New Server

A few weeks ago, we experienced a ~26-hour outage due to a failed power supply and extremely slow response times from OVH support. This was followed by an unexplained outage the next morning at the same time. To ensure Lemmy’s growth remains sustainable for the long term and to support other federated applications, I’ve donated a new physical server. This will give us a significant boost in resources while keeping the monthly cost increase minimal.

Our system specs today:

• Undoubtedly the cheapest hardware OVH could buy
• Intel Xeon E-2386G (6 cores @ 3.5ghz)
• 32gb of ram
• 2x 512gb Samsung nvme in raid 1
• 1gb network
• $155/month

The new system:

• Dell R7525
• AMD EPYC 7763 (64 cores @ 2.45ghz)
• 1tb of ram
• 3x 120gb sata ssd (hw raid 1 with a hot spare, for proxmox)
• 4x 6.4tb nvme (zfs mirrored + striped, for data)
• 1gb network with a 50mbit commit (See 95th percentile billing)
• Redundant power supplies
• Next day hardware support until Aug 2027
• $166/month + tax

This means instead of renting an entire server and having them be responsible for the hardware, we'll be renting co-location space at a Vancouver datacenter PDF via a 3rd party service provider I know.

These servers are extremely reliable but if there is a failure, either Otter or myself will be able to get access reasonably quickly. We also have full OOB access via idrac, so it's pretty unlikely we'll ever need to go on site.

Server Migration

Phase 1 is currently planned for Jan 29th or 30th and will completely move us out of OVH and onto our own hardware. I'm expecting probably a 2-3 hour outage, followed by an 6-8 hour window where some images may be missing as the object store resyncs. I'll make another follow up post in a week with specifics.

Phases 2+ I'm not 100% decided on yet and have not planned a timeline around. It would get us into a fully redundant (excluding hardware) setup that's easier to scale and manage down the road, but it does add a little bit of complexity.

• Dark mode diagram
• Light mode diagram

Let me know if you have any questions or comments, or feedback on the architecture!

Morning all!

I'm going to be taking the site down for about 5 minutes, so that I can get a consistent copy of our databases (postgres + pict-rs sled).

Will do it at about 10am PST.

Hope nobody missed anything during the outage