Unfortunately this lemmy site will be closing at the end of November.

The reason for this is I no longer believe several design choices have actually come to fruition with regards to how lemmy and the fediverse works. While other fediverse projects may work, I personally dont really see Lemmy as a frontrunner to bring a successful alternative to other similar projects such as reddit.

The main issues revolve around human behaviour - the top 20 lemmy sites account for most of the traffic. Users simply do not want to join smaller lemmy servers to spread the load in any meaningful way. So smaller lemmy sites such as my own have just a handful of daily users that could just move to one of the top 20 sites with no real issues effectively. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list

There seems to be no downside to this as the last 3 years have proven that being on a bigger or smaller lemmy site is basically irrelevant.

The other issue is lemmys population is waning. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48 The number of monthly users is dwindling- now under a 750k a month and still falling - so the project itself is not even popular among users. Compare this to Mastadon which is growing - not shrinking. If people do not like the project then I do not feel invested in continuing to run it. I would rather spend the money in a different more popular and useful open source project.

For these basic reasons the decision is made and users are asked to migrate away by December to another project. There will be no further updates or maintenance to this server as a result.

Kind regards -P

Registration to this server had been changed to closed.

Recently made some performance changes (banned ips from china and some other improvements). Let me know if anything is better or worse since then.

If you have any issues since the changes (havent made any additional changes for about 3 days now) let me know.

I have given up trying to serve China region. Its just endless attacks on the server making it slow. I have banned all traffic from China. I also configured some caching rules to try improve performance. Let me know if there is any difference or anything not working 100%.

To improve response time for new signups and moderation in case of reports we are looking for people to assist as admins. To join you just need to:

Have been part of the server for 6 months be active (ie be able to login and assist).

Have a reliable post history showing you are mostly normal and not getting into constant trouble. (Ie not be annoying).

If this sounds like something you can help with send me a pm.

Works great and provides a mobile experience. Works well with the site from what I can see.

For some reason the latest version of lemmy required more CPU. This can bee seen on the graphs as well as when adding more CPU, the issues being resolved and speed and performance being restored.

6 CPU cores -----> 12 cores 16GB RAM -----> 48GB RAM 400GB disk -----> 500 GB disk CPU speed ~ 2200Mhz - 2800Mhz

Hopefully better now.

For some reason lemmy is consuming more CPU from the last update:

While memory and the rest seem fine I need to add more CPU.

I will look into this, probably this week and see what servers I can upgrade to that dont cost too much.

https://imgur.com/a/e32Csw7

Site was upgraded after working with the lemmy devs to find a fix.

If there are any issues let me know. Seems to be working from what I can tell.

I have been given a potential fix by the lemmy devs to be able to update to 0.19.12.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/3206#issuecomment-2994482703

I will attempt this fix sometime soon and if it fails revert a snapshot again, or if it succeeds post that we are up to date after. Will be in the next couple days sometime.

P

Lemmy 0.19.12 was reverted from snapshot as it broke logins for users. I dont have a fix but am investigating. Server was rolled back since troubleshooting the error did not find any resolution.

Lemmy was updated to 0.19.12 today.

https://lemmyverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/29579005

Did you notice downtime? Site was upgraded to 0.19.11 today - took about 30 minutes.

• P

To improve response time for new signups and moderation in case of reports we are looking for people to assist as admins. To join you just need to:

1. have been part of the server for 6 months
2. be active daily (ie be able to login and assist)
3. have a reliable post history showing you are mostly normal and not getting into constant trouble.

If this sounds like something you can help with send me a pm.

Also a legal eagle video here if you need a video overview: https://youtu.be/Vvv0_aVTzlI

To new users, please use voyager app for lemmy. This is what I test upgrades against and will always be made to work for lemmy. If it fails to function after an upgrade we will always roll back so it continues to function for users, so long as the app is not ever abandoned etc. Obviously you may use whatever app you want, but its functionality is not checked etc.

Post server migration recap:

Server move is completed as well as now the various scripts that keep the server doing what its supposed to. This includes the onsite and offsite backups so if there is any failure now we have copies locally of everything and as well as off site with the object storage provider in a different bucket.

Total cost is $15 a month for the server and backups so it is easy to pay for (basically cost of a starbucks coffee) and no risk of anything happening. It should be faster now and so on as I optimised the containers and how they were working as well.

Since the new server has more resources I have been able to clean up some of the scripts and there are no more reboots at all (previously server rebooted once per day). The only interruption is a daily stop of the dockers and backup which takes like 15 minutes total daily just to ensure postgres is consistent and easy to restore. This happens at 03:31-03:46 EST early morning.

For stats you can use this link: http://lemmy.myserv.one:2095/monitorix

If you have trouble opening it due to browser defaulting to https just try in a private window. Username and pass is lemmy/lemmy

Considering I just did a VPS server move and we have full consistent backups off site that are continually working both before snd after the move it seems likely that the service should continue to remain in action one way or another no matter what happens. I know hexbear instance died so just triple checked we wont have any similar upsets due to some oversight. Server = safe. Finances = safe. We should be good.

Im just going to leave the server alone and not log into it for a week and then see how it performed after that. I was fiddling around a bit last few days unfortunately just because after a server move a few things need changing to be more appropriate. I also had to log a bug on github for something to do with one of the packages used on the server. The server also got upgraded to latest Debian.

Many thanks P

I have completed the server move from old VPS to new VPS. As a result we now had extra CPU,RAM and Disk space.

I have also enabled stats for the server here now: http://lemmy.myserv.one:2095/monitorix username/pass: lemmy/lemmy

Let me know if anything is not working. I think its all working.

Many thanks, P

I have decided the best way to resolve the issues of disk space on the server is to change VPS providers. The server setup has to continue to be extremely cheap and incur no cost to the community, and the current provider does nto have plans that include the required disk space at a fair price point.

As a result I will need to change providers. The current VPS is : 8GB, 4CPU, 180GB disk.

I wish to change providers to this setup: 16GB, 6VPU, 400GB disk.

The cost is similar but as you can see I get more resources from changing the provider. This does mean I have to take everything offline, copy everything to a new VPS over the internet and then reconfigure everything on a new VPS. As a result I am selecting 14,15 and 16 February to do this. The server will either be down or only semi accessible on these days.

-P