Don't delete from the local_user table. You only need to delete from the person table, the rest of the tables will be updated automatically and user count will update automatically.

Edit: The below command will delete all unverified users. NOTE: If you do not have email verification turned on then all users are unverified, therefore all users will be deleted. It also appears with v18 when you enable email verification all existing users remain unverified.

This is a destructive command, use at your own risk and don't go fucking with the database if you don't have backups.

DELETE FROM person WHERE local = 'true' AND id IN (SELECT person_id FROM local_user WHERE email_verified = 'false');

In the parenthesis you can add your AND to only select unverified accounts of a certain age.

Assuming you don't want to expose these services directly to the internet (I don't recommend it) then you want to set up a VPN to connect back to your home network. Wireguard or OpenVPN are the most commonly used. As far as guides that will depend where/how you want to run it.

Lots of cheep SFF/thin client machines on eBay.

For large instances pictures is probably the bigger consumer of space, but for small instances the database size is the bigger issue because of federation. Also, mass storage for media is cheap, fast storage for databases is not. With my host I can get 1TB of object storage for $5 a month. Attached NVMe storage is $1 per month per 10 GB.

For my small instance the database is almost 4x as large as pictrs, and growing fast.

I agree. The more familiar I get with Lemmy under the hood it's apparent they weren't ready for this level of users, and there's a lot of rough edges. I also don't plan on quitting Reddit cold turkey, so definitely see Lemmy as something that can coexist as an alternative until is gets polished.

Reading through the r/Denver threads about the blackout it's clear vast majority of users are annoyed by it and don't give a shit about the API stuff, so probably best to avoid that topic altogether. The angle should be the general direction reddit is heading and giving power back to the users and their communities.

I think /r/Denver might be more open to it, I know @SpezCanLigmaBalls got permission to post there about the Denver community on lemmy.world.

Some satellites and rovers have used Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs), which are very different from a nuclear reactor. They use polonium-210, which generates heat, and that heat is converted to electricity with thermocouples. They are low power and inefficient.

To my knowledge no satellite, with an RTG, has ever used ion propulsion. Few interplanetary satellites have ever even used ion thrusters. Dawn, Hayabusa, and Deep Space 1 are the only I can think of, and they all used solar arrays.

Ion thrusters are super efficient, but produce extremely small amounts of thrust. They aren't practical for getting large spacecraft to Mars. These proposed nuclear engines produce large thrust while have efficiency somewhere between regular chemical propulsion and ion propulsion.

I went with Vultr for hosting and it's running on one of their servers in Dallas (closest I could get). It's their AMD high performance cloud compute, 1vCPU, 1 GB Memory, 2 TB bandwidth, 25 GB NVMe storage. Plus auto backups it costs $7.20 a month. Upgrading performance within their cloud compute is super quick an easy so I can bump up performance as needed. The .social TLD ended up being $30 for the year. I also had tons of issue with email so I also set up email through Zoho, which is another $12 a year. All said and done just over $10 a month.

On my to-do list is a post in the support community to keep track of all this in an effort to be as transparent as possible.

Sure, depends on what you want to do, that's just the command I used to purge unverified accounts. My instance doesn't really have any users so not a big deal.

Yeah, unless you are deleting hundreds of users you can't really tell, but I deleted 6k+ bots and can confirm user count automatically updates.

Yep

I messaged the mods of /r/colorado and unfortunately, they declined, citing privacy and security concerns with the fediverse.

Been using Zoho for years, cheap and reliable.

I still think instances should be largely region based, which is why I started one for Colorado. As far as sharing it I'm not really sure either other than spamming it everywhere (which I also don't want to do). Instance discovery kind of sucks, you can't even search on the main join Lemmy page.

The cheapest CyberPower/APC that is pure sine wave should be just fine.

Will do! For now, the cost isn't an issue but if the instance gains traction, and I have to start upgrading the server/add more storage, I'll start looking into donations. I think the main thing for now is promoting to gain some users!

Simplest is to just spin up an Ubuntu VM in Azure and install Lemmy using Ansible.

For a basic personal server you really don't need much. I mess around with one on Azure using a Standard_B1s VM (1vCPU/1GB RAM) and it ran fine. Cost like $7.28 a month.

Wow, I'm closer to Roxborough, had no idea. Luckily just some small hail and hard rain.

Looks like my instance got hit with a bot. I had email verification enabled but had missed turning on captcha (captcha enable should be up with enabling email verification settings). The bot used fake emails so none of the accounts are verified, but still goes towards account numbers. Is there really any good way to clean this up? Need a way to purge unverified accounts or something.

Yes, person table is top level. Delete from person table and it cascades down and deletes from other tables. User count also automatically updates. Just be careful because person table also contains federated users. There is a "local" column to determine if they are local users or not.

I had about 6k bot accounts, but they were all unverified, so I just deleted all local unverified accounts from the person table.

Just don't go messing with the database without backups. My host supports snapshots so I did a quick snapshot before messing with anything.