Spyke

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Hosting Lemmy experience

I run a modest Lemmy instance (lemmy.blehiscool.com). It’s not on the scale of lemmy.world or anything, but it’s been around long enough that I’ve had to deal with some real growth and scaling issues. I’ll try to focus on what actually matters in practice rather than theory.

Infrastructure

I’m running everything via Docker Compose on a single VPS (22GB RAM, 8 vCPU). That includes Postgres, Pictrs, and the Lemmy services.

This setup is great right up until it suddenly isn’t.

The main scaling issue I hit was federation backlog. At one point, the queue started piling up badly, and the fix was increasing federation worker threads (I’m currently at 128).

If you run into this, check your lemmy_federate logs—if you see:

“Waiting for X workers”

that’s your early warning sign.

What Actually Takes Time

Once your infrastructure is stable, the technical side becomes pretty low-effort.

The real time sink is moderation and community management. Easily 90% of the work.

On the technical side, my setup is pretty straightforward:

  • Auto updates: Watchtower (with major versions pinned)
  • Monitoring: Uptime Kuma
  • Backups: Weekly pg_dump + VPS-level backups

Backups are boring right up until they aren’t. Test your restores. Seriously.

Where the Gaps Are

The main gaps I’ve run into:

  • Pictrs storage growth Images from federated content add up fast. Keep an eye on disk usage.

  • Postgres tuning As tables grow, default configs start to fall behind.

  • Federation queue visibility There’s no great built-in “at a glance” view—you end up relying on logs.

My Actual Workflow

Nothing fancy, just consistent habits:

Daily (quick check):

  • Check Uptime Kuma
  • Skim logs for obvious errors

Weekly:

  • Check disk usage (especially Pictrs)

Monthly:

  • Update containers (after reading changelogs)
  • Verify backups can actually be restored

As needed:

  • Moderation decisions

What I’d Do Differently

If I were starting over:

  • Set up proper log aggregation much earlier (still a weak spot for me)

TL;DR

  • Infra is the easy part once stable
  • Moderation is the real workload
  • Backups matter more than you think (and need testing)
  • Logs are your best friend—but painful without centralization

Happy to answer specifics if you’re planning a setup—there’s a lot of small gotchas that only show up once you’ve been running things for a while.

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Does anyone use QubesOS as a daily driver?

You don’t necessarily need QubesOS to get better isolation. You can package unsupported applications as Flatpaks yourself and run them with minimal permissions. The downside is the maintenance burden, and Flatpak sandboxing isn’t as strong as Qubes’ VM-based isolation. It’s a useful middle ground, but it doesn’t completely solve supply-chain risk. Qubes can be good, but it's all about your friction budget.

Humans optimise for convenience eventually.

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Hackers are trying to steal Signal users' backups in new wave of widespread attacks

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Phishing actually is a core branch of hacking—specifically under Social Engineering. It's not really like walking through an unlocked door; it's more like a con artist dressing up as a locksmith and convincing the homeowner to hand over the keys.

Hacking applies to the entire attack surface, which includes the human element, further more there are whole phishing campaigns that are heavily automated and often deliver stealer malware, making them a full cyber attack.

This wasn’t a technical compromise of Signal itself, but phishing/social engineering is still a form of hacking.

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*Permanently Deleted*

A more neutral way to put it is that libertarianism and anarchism both value individual freedom, but differ on the role of the state.

Libertarians generally want a minimal state (for things like courts, police, national defense), while anarchists want to eliminate the state entirely.

There are also different kinds of anarchists—some are anti-capitalist, while others (like anarcho-capitalists) overlap more with libertarian ideas.

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Leak confirms GrapheneOS & Motorola partnership for non-Pixel hardware - PiunikaWeb

Something I’ve been thinking about: independent security projects often face pressure once corporate partnerships or funding enter the picture.

Does GrapheneOS have any structural safeguards to ensure development priorities remain community-driven if hardware vendors become more involved?

I’m not assuming there’s a problem — just interested in how projects like this avoid the “venture capital influence” problem that has affected other open source initiatives.