The best time for an update, while hopped up on candy , coffee, and playing trick or treat on the neighbours, enjoying family, friends or just a relaxing day. I hope wherever you are, you are enjoying the holiday season(s).
Reddthat has been super stable and nothing major to report except for pictrs crashing recently (as my lack of updates may have proven).
This sat in my drafts for way too long! But now's the time to finally update you all as there are actually items to update you on!
Moderation
The other admins haven't been online as much lately and I'm doing most of the moderation. So I may end up asking people if they would like to become administrators of reddthat. Mainly I need some people in US time zones and EU time zones. (Which should nearly be all of you ๐ !). The majority of the work results in actioning reports and ensuring we don't let bots/people not even trying to read the application process into Reddthat.
If you would like a position, please PM me with:
- Your timezone/Active Hours
- What makes you a good candidate for an Admin. (Prev experience?)
Storage storage Storage. New Server!?
As I went to purchase the new server in June/July right after posting our last update the company IMMEDIATELY jacked up their prices. It must have been a typo because it's now for $135/m. Which would give us 2x500GB and 32GB of Ram. The processor is a Xeon E-2136 , which only comes with 12 threads! With a single thread rating of 2700, which is about double of what OVH is giving us.
So hopefully our database will be even faster once we make the change.
On OVH, we managed to finally get the storage increase and it's worked without any problems. Which was perfect timing really. We now sit at around 75% usage of our 200GB drive. So I'm hoping to get 2-3 more months out of it and pray to the tech gods there are some black friday dedicated server deals or even Christmas ones which will allow us to get a better deal.
And that was what happened. We managed to get a deal on a dedicated server in OVH which was around the $90/m . So only a little bit more than what we are paying now. Which is great. From a brief benchmark we get at least 1.5x faster CPU which equates to shorter scheduled tasks, faster queries, and more resources available to showing everyone their own subscriptions and memes. That's not inclusive of the 500GB ssds, which will allow for our database to grow to 2-3x our current total. Which means this should last us around 4-6 years (at the current growth of Lemmy as a whole).
I've been getting it working over the past 2 weeks Oz. We're taking this time to also upgrade to Debian Trixie, which is currently not supported by the Lemmy ansible repo. So I will be upstreaming that change once I fixed it. This includes keeping it up to date so that when we do the swap over in a week's time it will be as short as 5 minutes and as long as 15 minutes for the swap over to happen. I'm pretty sure it will be closer to 15mins as even at 1Gb/s our 100GB database will take around 800s to completely migrate at the theoretical maximum. (And a brief 15 minutes, is better than mucking around with postgres' HA).
This server change is probably going to happen on the 27th/28th. I'll add another post outlining the timeline on the day.
Cheers,
Tiff
Note: On Liberapay, donations are paid in advance, but you are more than welcome to make it recurring monthly instead of paying yearly. Don't worry too much about the "fees". It's just the cost of doing business via the credit card monopoly.
๐ธ "Expenses":
- August Costs: ~A$116
- September Costs: ~A$117
- October Costs: ~A$121 (Increased storage costs and falling AUD/USD)
- Nov Costs: ~A$125
- Dec Costs: ~A$125
โญ Donation "Statistics":
- New Donators in Aug,Sept,Oct: 2
- Thank you again! September and October was dedicated to both of you!
- New Donators in Nov, Dec: 0
- Total Weekly: ~$24.54
- ("Monthly": 24.54ร52รท12 = ~$106.34)
- Our Public Donators:
- AppleStrudel
- ~1890351
- Matthew Fennell
๐ฅ Goal: 24.54 / 60.00
Want a month dedicated to you? -> https://liberapay.com/reddthat
PS: don't like fees? Use Crypto (Litecoin/Monero) for even better transaction fees than credit cards for your donation. (See the main sidebar for addresses). And validate them again on liberapay too if you want to ensure I get those dollary doos.
For our application process, as we only require 1 piece of information which is easily scriptable from the API (if someone were to go into that level of automating). But there is at this time 1+ people who regularly signup wait a week+ and then use the account to post something , wait 2 hours and then delete the whole account. (Resulting in all links and history to be deleted).
In the recent Lemmy update that fixed the exploit where even admins would no longer be able to view the account(s).
The actual bots on the other hand are completely dumb and could be automated away, but at the end of the day, I don't want to destroy someone's account creation due to some LLM hallucination.
And some are obvious bot names, (like "holidaydestination") but still fill out the form correctly.
Reports are case by case basis with a fair amount of leeway for reddthat users as just because I am from a specific country doesn't mean I have the right to impose my biases on others.