Meta

Not entirely clear to me what is going on, but we've seen a large influx in traffic from oversea today. This has lead to high CPU and performance issues.

I've put in place a block to what seems to be the source of the traffic, but its not perfect and may cause other issues. If you see/hear of any please let me know here.

The "Nicole" spammer is annoying, but it's a great test of our anti-spam capabilities.

Spam is a real threat. efore this instance was made, there was a right-wing troll using open-registration instances to spam shock porn on every post they could until they were banned, then come back the next day. And with the increased popularity of Lemmy, commercial spam is more and more likely to begin.

If you have the capability to block text, could you try to block the Nicole spam messages?

!ask@lemm.ee

2 minutes vs 1.6 days

https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=aussie.zone&var-remote_instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=lemm.ee

Police are searching for a missing bot known as sydbot. It was last seen on 17 February 2025 in the Sydney community.

Members had expected weekly discussion threads for the past two weeks, but sydbot did not show at the expected times. The Sydney community hold grave fears for its safety.

sydbot is not considered dangerous, and if you see sydbot, please give him a boot so he resets and goes back to normal and can create weekly discussion threads.

A community for users of the wholesale electricity provider Amber to discuss strategies for optimising energy use, and request help with understanding how energy bills work with wholesale electricity.

There are several Amber groups on Facebook and Discord, but nothing that is publicly accessible or viewable without an account.

EDIT: The name is still under consideration. Suggestions for a name to encompass all users of wholesale electricity prices are appreciated. I'm currently leaning toward "Wholesale Energy Australia".

Got a two-day-old reply just now.

When I hit the "Create" button to make a new post, the loading icon spins forever on the "Create" button. When I check the feed, though, the post has been created, and I can just close the "Create Post" tab without it affecting anything.

Not really a problem, but it could be a little confusing for people, and may lead to people making duplicate posts.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Maybe it's just a problem with my own browser.

Hi all! :)

I have an idea to begin posting community/sporting events going on for the communities c/perth and c/environment.

I've developed some lists of events across the year for each, the one below is the one for c/perth so far.

Due to the nature of an 'event' there're often commercial aspects, or they are outright commercial enterprises running these things. This means my idea to start posting about these events runs up hard against rule 4, no ads/spamming.

I'm looking for a ruling/guidance on how to choose an event to not be in contravention of this rule? Or even whether i need to walk away from this idea completely due to the grey area this imight be.

This post mainly pertains to the admins, but i'm really interested to know what others think, also if anybody has any ideas of events i've not thought about. @lodion@aussie.zone @Nath@aussie.zone

Here is the list i have so far for c/perth as an example of the events i'm thinking about.

If people have ideas for other WA events i'm definitely looking for more, i'd preferably like to develop an initial list of around 50.

• The Western derby (AFL)
• Avon descent
• Port to Pub
• HBF run for a reason
• City to surf
• Telethon
• Rottnest swim
• Camel cup (kal)
• Targa west
• Possible ascot spring carnival
• Astrofest
• ECU engineering school gokarts
• Margaret river pro surfing
• City Xmas lights trail, 22nd Nov, https://visitperth.com/events/rio-tinto-christmas-lights-trail
• Xmas light trails in the burbs
• Garage sale trail
• Record store day (maybe, could be considered advertising/promotion)
• Sculptures by the Sea
• Weekend post about which community markets are on that weekend inPerth.
• WAM WA music awards
• Northam Indy 500
• Canarvon Windfest day

My reason for thinking about this, is since becoming involved with Aussie Zone and searching for good sources for posts i've found quite a few sites that purport to be about promoting local "events" but are little more than paid tourism/hospitality event promotion sites. The most acceptable site like this i've found is probably 'Perth is Ok' who actually do put up the odd interesting article in between what look like paid placements. So i's thinking a useful update service of real community events could be helpful for people.

Cheers everyone in advance for your input on this :)

Any chance of getting a community for rural areas set up? Maybe c/Outback or c/Bush or similar. For topics specifically related to rural areas

I think in the long term if we continue growing, it would be best to separate this into communities for each state/territory, at least the large ones. Such as r/Vic and r/NSW over on Reddit. But while it's still quietish here, I think a single jumbo community for basically all non urban areas would be fine

And another:

Would we be able to get an Australian Trains or Australian Transport community running? I don't think it's worthwhile creating train related communities for every city, so this would essentially serve as a transport community for everywhere else in Aus outside the major cities.

I think Melbourne and Sydney are still deserving of their own communities, but !BrisbaneTrains@aussie.zone is fairly inactive, so if the over abundance of PT related communities is a concern, I'd be open to polling the few members over there on whether they'd be in favour of closing it off to new posts and redirecting people to the AusTrains community instead

This instance is well into a second year of existence now, and while changes have happened its stable.

Thinking about longevity, i think Aussie Zone could benefit from a direction setting and issue defining annual meeting of sorts.

Issues like the large amount of dead communities and why they're left, decisions that need to be made about inactive moderators, financing (if this hangs around for a long time this might become an issue for Lodion), broader direction setting, also might be a good way to look back on the years events and assess whats happened perhaps after some time has passed.

Its structure being analogous to a companys AGM, hence the name, the thread could be locked after two days or a week, etc, and amount of questions allowed per user limited.

In saying all this, i'm not forgetting that this is Lodion and Nath's beast. But i think it could be useful to find out the broader instances thoughts or concerns, for instance if a user doesn't feel an issue warrants its own thread, an AGT could be useful for that.

And, of course, the structure would have to be thoughtfully done. It can't set up an us against them scenario in any configuration that could possibly detrimentally occur. Can't also be an agonybaints session, the rules would have to foster only productive and earnest conversation.

I don't know, I by no means have a fully fleshed out idea here. But what do people think of an AGT or something along that vein?

Does anyone know what has happened here, I've got two Brisbane subs? I posted in one and then it cross posted to the other... but how is there two in the same place? They both link back to https://aussie.zone/c/brisbane

I'm about to restart services for this upgrade. Shouldn't be down longer than a few minutes.

Just noticed they deleted their account 8 days ago :(

Another beloved member of the community who will be sadly missed.

Unsure if this is just me or my vpn (mullvad) to blame or the server software but on my phone and desktop every now and then the site will fail to load, no errors just a blank screen and just before I posted a comment but it just sat there and didn't do anything for like 10 seconds then I was able to click post again and it put it through.

I would like to get more evidence but it's tough because ping seems to be ok

Just wondering if anyone else is noticing as well?

Phew! This last day there have been some pretty toxic comments on Aussie Zone from people from other instances.

Is it just me noticing or have there been more than usual today?

Starting to understand beehaws move to a more private setting a while back.

^note: i'm not calling for anything, just venting my spleen^

I'm pretty sure we're all across the recent decision to restrict social media to people aged 16+, but has any thought been put into how we'll respond to this?

I know we have about a year to figure it all out, but I am worried about the future of aussie.zone. @Nath@aussie.zone @lodion@aussie.zone do you have the time to implement something? Do you feel comfortable collecting the required information and managing age verification? Are donations sufficient to allow you to pay some other company to do it for you?

Another option is that we may be able to apply for an exemption from the eSafety Commissioner - but is that an actual option? Do either of you have the ability and time to procure the required documentation and write letters to the commissioner, or whatever else is needed?

Perhaps more importantly; what modifications could even be put in place that would be compatible with Lemmy? Will the instance just shut down?

If worse comes to worst, could another option be disabling signups and banning/removing all users, but keeping the instance open as a remote instance accessible solely through other instances?

Forgive me if I am being cynical and jumping the gun, but I am genuinely concerned that a solution won't be found, or neither of you will have the time/ability to implement one, forcing aussie.zone to come to a close. I really love our little instance, and it would be a major shame to see it go.

Whatever happens, please don't just leave us in the dark before eventually pulling the plug on AZ with a couple of days notice (or worse: no notice)

I'll be working on upgrading aussie.zone to lemmy 0.19.6 today. All going well disruption will be brief, but there may be some performance issues related to back end DB changes required as part of the upgrade.

I'll unpin this once complete.

I'm making this post directly in response to the extremist moderation in this thread, though I came very close a little while ago to a similar post because of moderation here

Comments that have been removed on the grounds of "No bigotry" include:

There are no good guys in that conflict. Only innocent civilians.

Maybe provide examples? I see nothing that would prevent me from saying that with a straight face.

Gee, I don't know, I vaguely recall a (perhaps minor) news item happening on the 7th, something about a music festival? I may be misremembering though, since this very impartial news site has no mention of it whatsoever.

It's a terrorist organization vs terrorist state. The only good guys are the civilians dying on both sides.

Everyone who opposes genocide, colonialism, and terrorism are the good guys, so neither Israel or Hamas. But Hamas is not Palestine/Palestinians, the same way that Israel/Zionism is not Jewish/Judaism; no matter how much Israel, Hamas, the media, or military industrial complex tries to conflate them all. IMO Israel is more to blame than Hamas as they should know better given a) their history of persecution b) their significantly greater wealth and education, and c) their demographics — more than half of all Palestinians are technically children, below 18.

I don't know what could possibly be less "bigotry" than that last statement. Now, I side pretty much 100% with Palestine in the Palestinian genocide being committed by Israel, but it's not even remotely bigoted to suggest that maybe the killing of civilians, even if done in the name of a good cause, does not make the killers "the good guys" (even if they are "the better guys of the two bad guys").

And in the other thread, they removed comments like:

That's pathetic. That's a pathetic misunderstanding of geopolitics and the nature of modern intelligence infrastructure. You're still in the mindset of "Having SIGINT = bad guys". As if places like Russia, and North Korea would just be magical kingdoms of freedom and accountability if they just didn't have signals intelligence! That's stupid. What differentiates the west (much like what differentiates good media sources from bad) - is accountability, and oversight. Anyways I'll let you get back to your petty fears and misunderstanding the basic lay of the informational and geopolitical landscapes. Maybe if Trump magically wins the election Glenn Greenwald will spend Trump's time in office attacking the Democrats and defending Trump and Russia again. I'm sure you'd enjoy that. The crypto-rightwing are just like that. Aren't you. Semi-pro-authoritarians who don't understand what causes freedom, and think it's something about being a soldier of fortune for a foreign state, or something that comes from "the barrel of a gun". Idiots believing they're freedom fighters popping some imaginary info-bubble. You don't know how lucky you are, or how good you have it, or why... That's your problem, and your weakness.

which were critical of authoritarian states in a mildly impolite way for being violations of their "Be respectful" rule. Meanwhile they failed to remove (and in fact, the comments came directly from an admin) comments that are far more directly disrespectful to their interlocutor, like:

This is wrong on so many levels 😂 If you’re this propagandized, then I’m sure you don’t know what actually happened in and around Tiananmen Square, which by the way is not even censored in China like we’re always told.

Followed by a gish gallop of links.

And

Okay, stay confidently incorrect in the Five Eyes corporate media bubble then 👍

“I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.”

and the especially pathetic disrespectful comment consisting of nothing but:

The admins of that instance are pretty blatantly disregarding their own rules in order to push their agenda. If that shouldn't be grounds for defederation, I don't know what should.

edit: accidentally left a link out earlier

I've spun this up for fun, to see how it compares to the base lemmy UI. Give it a whirl, and post any feedback in this thread. Enjoy!

It could go down at any time, as it looks as though the dev is no longer maintining it...

edit: using this https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym

UPDATE Tuesday 12/11: I've killed this off for now. Unclear of why, but was seeing a huge number of requests from this frontend to the lemmy server back end. Today it alone sent ~40% more requests than all clients and federation messages combined.

Its been 6 months or so... figure its time for another of these. Keep in mind there have been some major config changes in the last week, which has resulted in the oddities below.

Graphs below cover 2 months, except Cloudflare which only goes to 30 days on free accounts.

CPU:

Memory:

Network:

Storage:

Cloudflare caching:

Comments: The server is still happily chugging along. Looking even happier now that I've properly migrated pict-rs to its integrated object storage config, rather than the bodged up setup.

RAM/CPU are all fine. Storage use is growing slowly as various databases grow. Still a long way from needing to purge old posts, if ever.

Cloudflare is saving less traffic these days, since Lemmy added support to proxy all images. Not a concern, well under the bandwidth cap for the server.

As usual feel free to ask any questions.

I'm in the process of migrating images to a properly configured object storage setup. This involves an offline migration of files. Once complete, I'll start up pict-rs again. Until then, most images will be broken.

All going well this will finish by morning Perth time, and once up and running again may help with the ongoing issues we've had with images.

Over the last few days I've noticed that I'm semi-regularly getting Cloudfare error pages with timeout errors when I go to load a page here. Once the site loads it normally works fine for a while. Sounds similar to Baku's post from a few months ago, if others are experiencing the same at the moment possibly a reboot would help here too?

Leading on from an issue with some lost stickied posts on !environment@aussie.zone , i'm now gathering together useful sources of information in regards the Aus environment.

On !perth i gathered them in the sidebar, so they should remain if i decide one day to remove my account.

I'm currently thinking to do the same thing with !environment@aussie.zone since i've lost those good stickied posts anyway.

My question, probably for !lodion@aussie.zone or !Nath@aussie.zone , is, is there an ability to add drop down menus to the sidebar to enable better organisation of the links.

If you look at the !perth sidebar its already a bit messy and unwieldy, i assume !environment@aussie.zone will only be more so, with the amount of source links likely to be added.

Edit: sorry for all the stuffed links, i'll try to fix them

@unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone's comments were deleted in a thread I was just looking at, and I went onto their profile and it also appears to have been deleted? Anyone have any knowledge about them? It's sad if we've lost such a long-time excellent member of this community.

After some users have had issues recently, I've finally gotten around to putting in place a better solution for outbound email from this instance. It now sends out via Amazon SES, rather than directly from our OVH VPS.

The result is emails should actually get to more people now, rather than being blocked by over-enthusiastic spam filters... looking at you Outlook and Gmail.