We're fostering him and in a few weeks we'll adopt him. He's the sweetest two year old boy! Was found wandering the streets on his own; no collar, no chip.

Please say hi. He loves making friends.

I do not feel bad for this lady AT ALL, as humorous as this is. She should quit with the rest of her office.

The fog finally broke, and there it was: the end of January.

At this point I was beginning to suspect it had been extended without consultation. Days had started repeating. The same Monday kept turning up in different hats. Even the calendar looked tired of explaining itself.

People spoke of February in hushed, theoretical terms, like a place you might go one day if conditions improved. Some claimed they’d seen sunlight. Others said time was moving forward again, but there was no evidence to support this and these people were rightly ridiculed.

Still, it has arrived. The end of January. The beginning of February. We have made it.

---

Server Updates

Lemmy.zip

Well January was a fun month. In full "New Year, New Me" mode, the scrapers decided to full on try and take us down in their efforts to steal all the content.

Here is a graph:

Normally, this line should be flat/non existent. The orange is showing how many 502 errors we're seeing, and the purple is when everything gets overwhelmed and we start returning 504 errors and suddenly everyone gets a lovely cloudflare screen as the server screeches to a halt.

Our usual method of dealing with this is working out who is firing all this traffic at us and adding their ASN to the challenge list, which previously has then stopped them in their tracks. However they've likely changed track here, and we were seeing lots of sustained scraping from a whole range of IPs, lots of which were residential, and this left us with really only one choice, which was "challenge everything". So, we did just that.

Can you work out on this graph where we may have implemented that?!

This isn't particularly ideal for any of us but hey, people just can't play nice and we have to do stuff like that to stop us from being overwhelmed. The solve rate (i.e. how many requests are legit) is about 2.75% currently. In our last update we shared a screenshot showing a 0.16% solve rate with about 100k attempts per 24 hours - we're currently seeing 600k attempts every 24 hours, so the magnitude of what we need to deal with keeps going up.

Mods! Want people to tag things in your communities?

The ability to set, edit, remove etc tag enforcement from your communities is now available on modtools.lemmy.zip.

Piefed.zip

We have added the Photon front end to Piefed.zip - photon.piefed.zip It's still in beta due to the ever evolving code over on Piefed, but works really well (just like photon for lemmy does!)

We're also going to schedule some downtime on Piefed.zip to upgrade the server. With all the new users (Hello!!) it's starting to push at the seams of suitable performance, so a little bit of extra juice will be on the way. We'll let you all know when that is due to take place.

Piefed has also picked up a bit of attention on Reddit and the like - so if you've come from there, welcome aboard!

---

Please Don’t Be a Lurker!

If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip isn’t money, praise, or a gold plated retirement clock.. maybe. Its participation.

Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about whether cereal is technically a soup. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession. (We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)

The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.

So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:

Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.

---

Donations

I come with a blunt request this month, one that I'm not a fan of doing and have tried to avoid as much as possible. Please remember that unlike traditional social media sites, we don't sell your data to advertisers to shove adverts down your throat, and we go out of our way to prevent any form of advertisement making its way on here.

This form of social media is truly free to use.

We can only continue to exist because of the generous donations of our users. If you too truly value your freedom, please help support it for everyone with a small donation.

Want to support us? We have a range of donation options to suit you!

Liberpay (Card, Paypal)

Liberpay is our newest donation method. You can donate with Paypal or with a card. The link is https://liberapay.com/dotzip

OpenCollective (Card)

Our classic donation option, but only supports card payments. The link is https://opencollective.com/lemmyzip

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip or Piefed.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the sites and keeping the virtual lights on.

Ko-Fi (Card, Paypal)

We also have our Ko-Fi page if you'd rather use this site, which also supports Paypal and Card payments.

Thank you!

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

---

Graphs!

Piefed.zip

CPU over 7 days:

RAM

Images:

Cloudflare overview (30 days)

(We did some work on caching and doubled how much we cache!)

Requests

Bandwidth

Unique Visitors

Lemmy.zip

CPU over 30 days:

RAM:

Disk space:

Images:

Cloudflare Overview:

Requests:

Bandwidth:

Visitors:

---

Stuff for nerds

If, like me, you really like using the terminal on your arch install (I use arch btw) then you will know just how cumbersome it is having to open a web browser just to browse social media and post your thoughts.

Not so long ago, I stumbled across Stegodon which is an SSH-first federated blogging platform - yes, social media in your terminal.

To that end, I've spun up my own personal project at Stegodon.zip which you can connect to via ssh stegodon.zip - it really is that easy (You will need ssh keys first.. you have ssh keys right??)

You are all invited to try it out :)

---

OK well that's it for now. It has started to snow outside so I'm off to look out the window and moan about the snow while the whole country grinds to a halt, the schools are shut down, flights are cancelled, and supermarket shelves are emptied because there is a very light dusting. Can't wait.

Speak soon!

Demigodrick

The gray catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) is a species of bird in the mimid family, Mimidae. It is native to most of temperate North America east of the Rocky Mountains, mostly migrating to the southeastern United States, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in winter. It is gray in color across most of its body, and with a length ranging from 20.5 to 24 cm (8.1 to 9.4 in) and a span of 22 to 30 cm (8.7 to 11.8 in) across the wings. The gray catbird's diet consists mainly of arthropods and berries, with foraging taking place on the ground in leaf litter, and also in shrubs and trees. This gray catbird was photographed in Brooklyn, New York City, United States.

Credit: Rhododendrites

CC BY-SA 4.0

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/27053500

寿 なし子 | XCancel

https://wanderingwires.net/notes/aiaeylfct7g3dfk7

Oh what a tangled web a planetary nebula can weave. The Red Spider Planetary Nebula shows the complex structure that can result when a normal star ejects its outer gases and becomes a white dwarf star. Officially tagged NGC 6537, this two-lobed symmetric planetary nebula houses one of the hottest white dwarfs ever observed, probably as part of a binary star system. Internal winds flowing out from the central stars, have been measured in excess of 1,000 kilometers per second. These winds expand the nebula, flow along the nebula's walls, and cause waves of hot gas and dust to collide. Atoms caught in these colliding shocks radiate light shown in the featured false-color infrared picture by the James Webb Space Telescope. The Red Spider Nebula lies toward the constellation of the Archer (Sagittarius). Its distance is not well known but has been estimated by some to be about 4,000 light-years.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. H. Kastner (RIT)

At the beginning of last month, a crosspost to a lemm.ee community showed up in my feed - and it would seem that it showed up in mine alone.

I commented, but nobody else did - and nobody seems to have upvoted or downvoted the post either.

IIRC lemm.ee’s closure is older than this account.

If anyone has any insight, I’m a bit curious to know how and why this could have happened.

Otherwise, behold and regale this weird thing that happened for me!

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/41509803

Source