Hi guys,

Im doing some saturday testing for old.lemmy.today again.

Currently login is required for old.lemmy.today to read posts there. If you are already logged in, you wont notice any difference.

The reason im experimenting is because bots are hammering it, and I wanted to get some statistics of load if I simply dont allow anonymous scraping. Some bots are passing Anubis and scraping content.

So just log in if you havent and it will work just as before.

Thank you!

Hi guys,

We are now trying out Anubis in front of https://old.lemmy.today/ to see if we can block many of the bots scraping lemmy content.

You will notice an image saying Anubis is checking if you are a bot, and then things should work normally after that.

There are many millions of ips trying to scrape lemmy content so blocking on ip level is difficult. Hopefully this improves the situation somewhat. :)

Thanks to @[email protected] for sharing info about Anubis!

Edit: It was a lot better to just turn off public access of posts on old.lemmy.today, so we are actually not using Anunis anymore. Just log in to old.lemmy.today and things will work as normal.

Hi,

We had a DDOS attack against old.lemmy.today which overloaded the entire server for about 20 minutes. I had to turn off old.lemmy.today temporarily and will look through logs and probably block more chinese ip ranges, since thats where it came from.

Always something to do. :) Keeping this as sticky for a while to inform everyone.

Edit: I added more ip blocks for Chinese networks and hopefully it will keep future bots away. Bringing up the old.lemmy.today user interface again...

Edit 2: Had to take it down again due to massive bot scraping. Currently down.

Edit 3: Decided to require login for old.lemmy.today instead of using anubis.

Hi guys,

There is some disk maintenance taking place for the next few days at our hosting provider Hetzner, and they say disk performance could be less than normal but remain operational.

It will affect our images only if it affects anything at all. So if you notice slow images, its temporary for the coming two days only. Probably we dont notice it but wanted to give a heads up. :)

Thank you!

Hi everyone!

Main theme updated today

The original cyberpunkish theme has been updated quite a lot today. A lot of things were not properly themed in the old version and the code was just hacked together. Im not a web designer so im learning while I go.

New version is rewritten from scratch and attempts to properly theme the entire Lemmy user interface. Its also using variables everywhere for how things look and feel.

Future plans

1. Make a light version of this theme.
2. Share with the lemmy community so it can be used on other instances. Upvote the post if you would like this theme as a choice on your instance.

Huge thanks to Allero

Ive been getting so much feedback on this theme during development from @[email protected], and he (or she) has managed to find lots of things that didnt look quite right. The theme is so much better now because of this help. Super grateful to have had a partner in crime on this one. :)

Important / How to update

In the web browser, you should refresh the theme. Hold shift, hit the reload button, and you should see the new version pop up.

So whats changed?

Quite a lot actually. Almost everything has been tuned to some degree.

• Added a top bar to complete the look. We use rounded shapes here and in the navigation menus, as an intentional contrast to the more square look of the elements below it.

• The editor and post view has been restyled with proper support for images, headlines and other things. The sidebar also improved.

• Comment indent lines changed a bit to be more in the background.

• Comments are styling code blocks, images, markdown and other things.

• Post cards got their rails tuned down a bit, and the upvote and downvote arrows follow the theme colors. There is no underline on the card links anymore, for a cleaner look and feel.

• Tables got a bit of cyberpunk feel to them

• Settings changed its look as well

• Listboxes are themed just like everything else

• And dropdown menus

And lots more small details everywhere.

If you see something that is not themed or not looking correct, please let me know and it will be fixed. :)

Hi guys,

One interesting aspect of Lemmy being federated is that there are a lot of broken servers out there who constantly fails to federate. It can be anything that speaks activitypub really, and some of those servers are not properly federating, causing a super long queue of messages not being sent or received.

Ive been adding the most broken ones to our block list so we dont spend resources trying to talk to them. We are still federating with all activitypub servers that behave normally, so this is not about blocking instances that we dont like. This is about blocking broken ones only.

Just wanted to make a post about it so you guys know, in case you see that our instance is blocking instances now. Yes, we do, but only instances that dont federate properly. Otherwise we will continue trying to talk to them forever, wasting resources.

Thats it, just some info. Have a good week!

Hi everyone,

Tomorrow our hosting provider Hetzner needs to do an upgrade of their network components, and this affects the network disk we have pictures on.

We will therefore turn off the instance during this time. If you live in Orlando, you will probably be sleeping anyway, but europeans may notice how their memes refuse to load during this time. But we will be back as soon as Hetzner finishes the maintenance. Could be earlier than expected too. We will see.

Edit after downtime: Maintenance seems to have went well, server is up. :)

Hi guys,

So I decided to change the default theme to cyberpunkish.css to make this instance look different from a default lemmy instance.

If a lot of people tell me this is a shitty idea and I should not do this, I will revert it. Just wanted to give this instance a style of its own. The default theme is still there under lemmy_default.css if you prefer it.

Let me know if you have strong feelings about it, one way or the other!

Hi everyone!

There is a new theme called cyberpunkish in the web interface settings now.

I wanted to create a theme for this instance and this is my first stab at it. If you try it out, any feedback is very welcome!

I edited this post to show how it looks now in latest version. I will sticky this post for a day so regular users dont miss info about it.

Frontpage:

Comments:

Communities:

Huge thanks to @[email protected] for so much great feedback about the theme.

If many people think its great, perhaps we set it as default for the instance.

Hi guys,

The server just got upgraded to double the memory and cores. We had some peak periods where 8 GB was not enough to run everything, and now we get 8 more cores as well to serve more memes faster. :)

Plenty of room for more users too, if they should decide to join.

Thanks for picking this instance, guys. Enjoy Lemmy!

The attackers found another slow db query to exploit, so had to put some temporary measures in place.

Will post more details later!

This time they actually took down the instance for several hours.

Hi guys,

I wanted to ask you about our local communities here. I feel like a lot of them are not really active, and the most active one (like Conservative) has mostly locked posts, so people cant participate in discussions.

I wanted to get some input from you guys, what do you think? Should we have communities with locked posts so people cant comment? Does it still serve a purpose? Or should communities always allow discussions? My own opinion is that they should.

And should we clean up communities and remove inactive ones, making more room for local discussions?

The reason I started thinking about this is because I noticed that some other instances remove posts that are completely legal to discuss. They are just removed because admins/moderators dont like their content. Which is exactly like on reddit then.

Hi guys,

Another ddos attack so site was slow/unavailable for a while.

I disabled the alternative user interfaces since they are used in the attacks. Will think of some better long term solutions. 🥊 😄

Update 2: Another one at the moment, so site is slow. :)

Update: Another 30000 bots joined the party, so cpu usage is high at the moment. Site is slower than normal.

Appearently about 17500 bots are attempting to slow down our instance and eating bandwidth by grabbing the same files over and over.

They are banned for now but its an ongoing battle against these guys. Just wanted to let you know in case you notice worse performance. :)

Ive been running cosmic for the last couple of weeks and im very happy with it already. I think the future of linux desktops has never looked this bright.

Hi guys,

Server has been quite slow the last couple of days, and it turns out its because the old.lemmy.today user interface was being hammered and scraped by bots. I turned them off now temporarily while i look into this.

In the mean time, enjoy a faster instance, hopefully.. :)

Edit: And the user interfaces are back online.

Now everyone is rate limited on their real ip before hitting any of the alternate user interfaces. This means the web server can protect against bots hammering the site.

Currently it looks like its working. Both the default web site and the alternate user interfaces are fast again. Give the alternate ones a try if you are using a web browser to access the site. :)

On June 27:th, the https certificate for lemmy.today was supposed to renew itself. Its set up to automatically renew every 3 months, and its been working perfectly since the site was started over 2 years ago.

But this time it failed to do so, due to a syntax error in the web server config that was not noticed until this incident took place.

Its been fixed now but took more than a day unfortunantly. Sincere apologies for the long delay - it was because I was on vacation in Madeira and in the process of travelling home that day.

Life finds a way to kick us in the balls sometimes.

We are now on latest version. We had some downtime related to this. Normally its quick to update, but this time a database update was needed that took quite some time.

It was about 4 months since we had some downtime so not too bad. Hopefully we go another 4 months (or more) until the next one. :)

Sometimes I think people forget how much Lemmy users have incommon, and we just focus on the differences.

Lets look at some introduction letters from users lately who joined this instance:

I'm a technoligist based out of the United States. I want to explore the fediverse protocols, so I'm trying Lemmy and ActivityPub. Also, I jumped off Reddit when they began restricting API access heavily and have been looking for a link-aggregator alternative ever since.

I am an astronomer, nature lover in heart. I am tired of using apps and websites from companies spying on us and owning basically everything. I will be happy to switch from reddit to lemmy. I am curious though how do you know that a bot cannot write such a text.

Great interest in knowledge and competency building through balanced use of technology. I am currently in the process of moving away from the tech giants and their madness.

Reddit sucks now, want a decentralized, not profit driven alternative

I am a concerned citizen of a country run by Nazis and I am trying to escape most social media sites that harvest our data, I have been pointed in this direction by a privacy enthusiast who said this is the land of the free, Or something like that.

I am a longtime (15 years) reddit user, and I am looking for alternatives that are not driven by corporate interests.

We all really want the same thing. I also want the same thing, which is why I run this instance.

You are all part of a growing community of people who dont want the typical social media experience from ad-funded big tech companies who only care about profits. I think thats really cool.

Thanks for being part of Lemmy guys. :)

Hi everyone,

We just had some unexpected downtime due to a disk quickly getting full over night... :/

We will adjust the monitoring to start alerting us earlier for disk space running out so we can actually do something about it.

I took the chance to install the latest OS patches and updates now though since the server was anyway down.

Hope you didnt notice the downtime too much!