Lemdit Official

I'm about to perform this update in the next 10 minutes, all things going well there should be no downtime/instability.

I don't normally update to rc releases but it's worth it in this case as there are several important fixes:

• Captcha is working again
• "Reset password" is rate limited
• UI looks better ... and more.

The DB is backed up, I'll post an update here once everything's done.

Please don't be a bot.

On desktop breakpoints, the Subscribe and Block community buttons are not buttons at all, but non-interactable text. If I size down my browser to mobile breakpoints, the buttons function as expected. Just wanted to pass this info up the chain!

This issue is not present on in-federation communities

It looks like Lemmy 0.18.0 has some quirks:

1. Captcha is broken, despite the devs rolling back their plans to get rid of it. We got spammed with bot sign-ups before enabling the captcha, so I have enabled requiring registration applications until it gets fixed.

I personally hate registration applications, but I hate spam bots even more so it's a necessary evil for the time being.

2. Trying to delete your own account fails at the moment - I have submitted a bug report on this. I hope nobody here wants to delete their accounts, but if you do and you can't wait for this to be fixed, let me know and I'll delete it manually.

Other bits and bobs are funky too, but these seem to be the main issues that I've come across so far.

I will attempt to update the instance to Lemmy 0.18.0 in about an hour, it should only take ~5 minutes assuming all goes well.

Here you can find our guiding principles, rules and perspectives.

Rules

Please follow these rules while using our server:

• Nothing illegal in New Zealand
• Treat others with respect
• No porn / NSFW content

As a rule of thumb, if it's illegal in your home country then it's probably illegal in New Zealand too, especially if you're somewhere in the western world.

Speech

We’ve tried to keep the server rules down to a minimum as we don’t believe in micro managing what people can and can’t say. Please use common sense, treat others with respect and try to be an adult about it.

Communities are free to set their own rules and moderate as they see fit, noting that the general server rules will always apply everywhere.

Your speech is powerful and everything you say has the potential to change someone’s life in unexpected ways. Please try to use this power for good.

Communities

You are welcome to start a new community here as long as you respect our server rules and do so in good faith. Bad faith examples include:

• Spamming new communities
• Starting new communities just to reserve the name

Federation

Defederating from other instances is an absolute last resort and we will only do so under the following circumstances:

• If their content has the potential to get us into legal trouble
• If they are acting as an attack vector towards us

We also want to avoid being blocked and will work with any instance admin to try and prevent that from happening.

As a user, you have the ability to block any content you dislike and we encourage you to do so. Please do not ask us to defederate from anyone unless they meet one of the conditions mentioned above.

Notices

I run this server in my free time, using my own resources, out of my own pocket.

At the moment I believe I have sufficient resources to suport a lot of growth and see no reason why I should ever have to shut down the server. I am excited about Lemdit and want to see it grow into something beautiful for many years to come.

However, I also can’t see into the future and there is always the possibility that something unexpected will impact my ability to keep running this instance.

My pledge is to be as transparent as possible with you and do my best to resolve any issue that may arise.

If it can’t be resolved, then I will attempt to provide you with at least 30 days notice of the server shutting down, so that you may have enough time to find another home.

While it seems a bit cliche to talk about ~the server~, there are hundreds of Lemmy instances out there and you never know if the server is just someone's crappy old laptop. How the server is set up is also relevant, as it has a direct impact on your experience.

Server info

lemdit.com is running inside of a VM, on a self-hosted server that is located in New Zealand. Self-hosted means this server is a physical machine that sits a few meters away from me, not a virtual server provided by a 3rd party.

The Lemmy instance currently has 8 Xeon cores and 128GB of RAM allocated to it, which is complete overkill for the forseeable future. The host machine has 44 cores / 88 threads, 512 GB of RAM and 10Gb NICs, so there is plenty of room to grow.

The server is connected to the world via gigabit fibre. Due to how far New Zealand is from the rest of the world, Lemdit may not feel as snappy to you if you're in the US or the EU, for example, but it certainly shouldn't feel slow either.

Service continuity

While I don't live in a datacentre, I take some precautions to maximize resilience and uptime. The database is backed up daily and the VM image is also backed up periodically, which means restoring Lemdit is relatively easy and machine agnostic. I have a secondary server with similar specs that I can switch to if the primary server dies.

The server is connected to a UPS and there is a back-up petrol generator on hand in case of power failure.

There are some things that are outside of my means, such as having a redundant Internet connection. I'm also away from home often and won't always be immediately available to deal with events.

In general though our uptime track record is solid and you can expect Lemdit to be dependable. Reddit has had more outages than my self-hosted Libreddit instance has, for example.

Instance settings

This is how our Lemmy instance is configured and what that means:

• Open registration: enabled - Anyone can create an account by signing up, we do not require registration applications.
• E-mail verification: enabled - You will need to verify your e-mail address before your account is activated.
• User community creation: enabled - Users are able to create new communities themselves, without Admin intervention.
• Downvotes: enabled - Posts and comments can be downvoted as well as upvoted.
• NSFW: disabled - We don't allow NSFW content on this server.
• Image upload limit: 20MB - This is the maximum image size permitted on this server.

After a week of tinkering, lemdit.com is finally ready to sail on the great federated seas!

As of now there isn’t anyone here to mark the occasion, but this post will serve as the symbolic champagne bottle smashed against the hull of the ship.