Meta

We’ve already defederated one tanky instance, and frankly I think I’ve rarely had a positive interaction with Hexbear users. Their defence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or of China’s genocide against the Uighur people, is hard enough to stomach. But what prompted me to post this is their commentary in this thread where even without any of the propaganda-based reasons to justify their beliefs, they seem to delight in being rude arseholes to people.

Personally, I don’t think they provide us any real value, no we’d be better off without them, just as we are better off without lemmygrad and exploding-heads.

Not sure if this is a .19 bug or has always existed, but on the inbox page, if I have no unreads, click "all" then click back to unreads it shows DMs despite all DMs being read and the DM filter not even being selected

no unreads

click all

now in unreads DMs show up

The upgrade to lemmy 0.19 has introduced some issues that are being investigated.. but we currently have no fixes for:

• thumbnails break after a time. Caused by memory exhaustion killing object storage processes.
• messages to/from lemmy instance not yet running 0.19 are not federating. I believe it requires bugfixes by the devs.

~~I've re-enabled 2 hourly lemmy restarts. Hopefully this will help with both issues, though it will result in a disruption to the site around every couple of hours.

When the hourly restarts are disabled I'll unpin this post. As any other issues are identified I'll post them here too. ~~

Update: I've disabled the 2 hourly restart after upgrading to 0.19.2... lets see how this goes...

Update2: no issues seen since the upgrade, looks to have resolved both the memory leak and the federation issues. Hooray :)

~~I'll be restarting AZ today for an update to lemmy 0.19.~~

Upgrade complete.

This is a major upgrade, so I expect there to be some issues. Strap in, enjoy the ride.

Expect:

• further restarts
• bugs
• slowdowns
• logouts
• 2FA being disabled
• possibly issues with images, upgrading pictrs to 0.4 at the same time

Are there plans to switch to lemmy 0.19? we are still on 0.18.4, and the new version seems to have alot of useful features. Are there any problems stopping us from updating?

Meta threads will open federation to the fediverse soon, and while this is mainly to mastodon it will still affect lemmy. They are acting like they won't be evil, but let's be real this is Facebook when have they ever done that.

This article which has been trending lately explains some of the issues. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

This comment here is a simple analogy if you can't be bothered reading the article. https://lemmy.ca/comment/5702922

@lodion@aussie.zone

This isn't a question specifically about aussie.zone, per se, but I'm a bit confused about how subscriber numbers work on Lemmy. I often see a community that says it only has 40 or whatever subscribers, but then posts get hundreds of upvotes. So is the member number shown on communities just counting subscribers from our instance?

I noticed recently there's some slowness in the mornings. Things taking a while to load. Comments failing due to timeout etc.

When I switch to another instance everything works again so pretty sure it's not my internet.

Is there anything we can do or help with? Are there DOS or bot shenanigans going on?

Heya, could we get a SydneyTrains community created please? Thanks

I used to run R/BrisbaneTrains on spez's bullshit playground. Wondering if I can run it here.

I'm kicking off a storage upgrade on the server, expect it to proceed in the next 15 minutes and be back online shortly after.

Hi,

I was curious, after seeing quite a few spam posts originate from one particular instance, is there a way that I, as a user, can block instances, so that their users' posts don't appear on my feed completely?

Cheers

I haven't received email notifications for the last 48ish hours, and they aren't in the spam folder. Is email broken for the moment, or has Gmail just decided to ignore aussie.zone completely for whatever reason?

I came across this neat visualisation of the Fediverse - There we are on the left - a slightly bigger dot among the galaxy of tiny dots :)

We aren't really a big instance. We don't even make the top-20. Where we really hit above our weight though is our comment count.

We are medium in size, but we are super engaged.

I've just removed a post that had c*&t in the title. I'm not going to get into specific rules, but I don't want that language in post titles. In comments etc in context, fine. But post titles are displayed to all users without the possibility of being filtered.

Please think of others when posting.

Hi all.

With the success of the last week it looks like this place will be around for a while longer. To that end, I've created a Ko-fi profile where you can contribute to covering the ongoing costs associated with running Aussie.Zone, if you feel inclined.

There is no pressure to do this right now. Some have asked, and for me if the costs are covered its one less thing to think about. I'm ok covering the current costs associated with the site. However there will come a point I'll need to ask for contributions or shut the site down.

Read on if you're interested in my thoughts on where additional costs will arise for the operation of the site, otherwise.. have a nice day :)

Immediate

Current costs for running Aussie.Zone are:

• OVH VPS ~$66 AUD per month
• Wasabi object storage for images ~$11 AUD ($5.99 USD per month)
• OVH VPS automated backups $11 AUD per month

Medium term

Based on what I've seen so far, I expect the next pain point on the server will be needing either more CPU, or storage for the database. CPU usage is driven by local instance user count, storage more so by volume of posts across the wider fediverse.

Either of these is addressed by the current OVH VPS - "Comfort". RAM and storage can be upgraded independently for different prices.

Longer term...

Domain renewal with Porkbun ~$35 AUD ($24 USD)
Database storage... is going to be the killer of instances. OVH VPSs can be scaled up to 640GB for $160 AUD per month. But at that price we're into dedicated server territory.

Any questions, feel free to ask.

Ledger

This will detail cashflows associated with aussie.zone. Initial costs including domain registration (ends June 8 2024) and 1st month hosting (ends July 8th 2023) paid by me.

June 15 2023: $0 starting figure
June 15 2023: +$150 in donations 🎉
June 17 2023: -$8 enabled OVH VPS backups, pro-rata fee
June 23 2023: +$70 in donations (~$210 balance) 🎉