main

Back when I started this site around 2020 it was pretty much just me here. Most of the time the new user applications were from ultra lazy spammers peddling penis pills. I realized that all of you have been writing introductions but you don't know much about me so here is somewhat of an introduction.

I'm just a regular guy in the Cleveland, Ohio area who works in tech. I have 3 cats. My hobbies are tech stuff, shooting/guns, gardening, lifting, and to a smaller degree talking about leftist politics. I run this instance as well as I can on my own. Sometimes the site will go down or be slow but you can rest assured that I'm most likely aware of it when that happens. I monitor this site pretty closely.

It definitely feels weird (in a good but anxiety inducing way) to see so many people using the server I set up. Before the influx it didn't matter if the site was down for an hour or two while I worked out a deployment issue but that's not the case anymore. I would like to bring more sys admins on board eventually so if you're interested feel free to reach out.

Glad you're all here!

I've been pretty intrigued by regional communities in the fediverse era, since knowing your users' likely location allows you run your server nearby to maximize performance.

Having just learned about midwest.social, that got me curious -- what region is the server running in?

With just a click, this bookmarklet will redirect you to a foreign community on your native Lemmy instance

It brings your favourite lemmy back home!

If you don’t know what it is, it’s a bookmark that runs a small piece of code that works in all desktop or even mobile browsers

---

javascript:(function(){
var url = new URL(document.URL);
var baseURL = url.hostname;
var pathname = url.pathname;
window.location.href="https://midwest.social" + pathname + "@" + baseURL;
})();

---

Usage

1. Copy the code, replace "midwest.social" in the code to URL of your native instance (for example to "https://lemmy.ca")
2. Create a new bookmark, paste the code from previous step into URL field
3. Go to a non native lemmy community
4. Click the bookmarklet in your bookmarks bar to activate it.

Limitations

• it doesn't work on pages of foreign posts: only main pages of communities

Thought it was relevant.

So I was always a lurker and never uploaded anything, but I want to contribute to Lemmy as we all leave Reddit… can anyone help me upload a video from my iPhone? I’m not sure if it’s an issue with it being large (500+ MB for a 45s video), a wrong codec (the standard on iOS 16.5), or something else. Thanks!

Does the Midwest server not store essentially dead communities from other servers? For example I can find and join technology@beehaw but not iasip@lemmy.ml. I am guessing because the IASIP community doesn't meet some content or engagement threshold. But, I want to post there so it will meet the threshold! It seems like this could create duplicate communities across servers if small communities can't be easily revived.

The option to create a community is right up on top of my screen. That implies to me that it's a thing any of us can just do. I'm new here, though, and I don't wanna make a faux pas or whatever. I have questions.

1. Is there accepted etiquette around who creates a community or when?
2. How general-interest should communities on midwest.social remain?
3. Might creating more communities right now exacerbate the high CPU usage problems in any way?

It's probably actually impressive how little I know about subreddit moderation, to say nothing of Lemmy community moderation. I just don't want to incessantly ask things of a small number of people during an anomalous influx of instance traffic that's probably already demanding enough.

Which... I guess is what this post is. Woof. Sorry. Just wanna be a good citizen!

Just an FYI in case you feel like throwing me a few bucks to offset server costs every month or whatever.

On the midwest.social front page there is a "Communities from our friends:" section that links to communities on other servers.

Rather than linking to those servers, I would recommend that you link to those communities via midwest.social to make it easier for people to join them. i.e.

https://midwest.social/c/science@beehaw.org instead of https://beehaw.org/c/science.

I've been seeing posts of people creating accounts on different Lemmy servers to join communities because they don't understand that they can join any community on any server.

Thanks!

Hello everyone, I recently increased the pool size for the database and ran ANALYZE VERBOSE in it to optimize the queries. I'm cautiously optimistic that it has fixed 90% of the performance problems. Let me know feedback from this point going forward. We're getting a steady stream of applications and now that multiple apps have announced they'll shut down at the end of the month I doubt it will slow down.

Anybody else?

Here is the link, let me know if it doesn't work for some reason. I also have the link in the sidebar.

Also, feel free to join Occupy Lemmy and Company at https://matrix.to/#/#occupylemmyspace:perthchat.org

I like to donate to FOSS projects I use so that other people don't have to. How can I support my home instance? Perhaps I need my eyes checked but I don't see a Patreon link or the like in the main sidebar

@anusgangriseup@midwest.social

Curious to know if you're still seeing an influx of new users? I saw Beehaw was struggling a bit from their unexpected growth.

If you're leaving #Reddit over API extortion like I am, here's a way to burn your comment and post history so they can't profit off what you've contributed.

Hello everyone! I wanted to share a tool that allows you to find communities that you are interested in.

Link: https://browse.feddit.de/

You can search for a community (say, "solarpunk"). Then copy the link into your Lemmy search bar and subscribe to the community! It's posts will then show up on your subscribed feed automatically.

Alternatively, you can use a list of communities. I have created such a list:

Link: https://midwest.social/post/382481

I hope this has helped! Comment if you have any questions or want a recommendation.

@main Hello! I grew up in the midwest before moving to Oregon and if federation works how I want it to, this post should show up in the main community on midwest dot social. I'm a nerd and trans catgirl (kinda goes hand in hand anyways). Feel free to reply with an introduction of your own!

I was asked to create a Michigan community and so I did!

@main Test post from Mastodon!

Testing the federation. Let's see if this works at all.

Gaming - https://midwest.social/c/gaming

USA News/Politics - https://midwest.social/c/usa

Soccer - https://midwest.social/c/soccer

Not sure if this is how official Lemmy structure is supposed to be, but figured we could have dupe /c/ of these comms on our instance. They can x-post from other instances if needed but also can give a more specific insight into these topics that would tailor more to people in midwest.social.

With this server being geared towards people from the Midwest, we all realize how bitterly cold it has been this past day or two. Want to wish everyone a good weekend and also that everyone is safe and warm! Please keep in mind those who don't have warm shelter to stay in and try to help those less fortunate if possible.

Welcome! Feel free to introduce yourself here in the c/main channel if you'd like.

The high CPU issue that is causing midwest.social to slow way down and timeout on HTTP requests is still a mystery to me. But, it seems to do it less often and for less time now.

Here is CPU usage over 24 hours:

It's a bunch of SELECT statements in Postgres that all seem to fire at one time and take a while to complete as a batch. I've inspected the logs and haven't seen anything unusual. Just stuff federating and posts receiving upvotes.