beto

We've had an influx of new user recently, so I just wanted to welcome everyone. Feel free to introduce yourself and ask any questions.

Also, friendly reminder to donate if you can! The instance costs less than 10 cents per user per month, but with almost 600 users and only $9 of monthly donations I'm paying almost $50/month out of my pocket to keep it running. Thanks!

Hey, friends!

Just a heads up that I'll be upgrading the instance tomorrow (Mar 6th), and there will be considerable downtime since we need to migrate from Postgres 15 to 16.

Thanks!

Edit: done! We're running the latest version (0.19.9) now.

Are YOU ready to write 14 songs in 28 days?

Hey, friends!

In the last couple weeks I upgraded our instance to run the latest version of Lemmy, and because it was consuming more RAM today I upgraded the VPS to one with 4GB.

This means that the cost for running the instance have gone up. Historically I've been paying around $20 per month out of my pocket to run the instance (after Ko-fi donations), and this will increase to $35 after the upgrade.

Our cost per user is around $0.10/month, so it's not a lot. If you can contribute money, even $1/month, please do, it really helps.

Thanks!

Anyone else using the Woovebox?

I received mine last year, and I'm slowly starting to explore it. It's a full groovebox, with samples, live mode, song mode, multiple synth engines. So small!

Let's wait for the reviews to see if the transport is any good. It would be nice to have a decent quality new walkman on the market!

No major changes, just bug fixes.

Let me know if something's not working.

There has been a shitty incident where someone intentionally posted CSAM to a Lemmy community that unfortunately someone in our instance was subscribed to. Due to federation, the images might have been copied over to our instance storage.

Because of that I've taken the following measures until we understand the problem better:

1. I've defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
2. I've deleted all images uploaded since 2023-08-27 00:00:00 GMT.
3. I've disabled the image server.

I'll post updates when I have them. Thanks for understanding.

Link is also on the sidebar. We'll use it to keep people updated on releases and give support when people can't reach the Lemmy instance.

Also, I'm an IRC kind of person, so forgive my noobness with Matrix. 🙃

Hey, hey!

This morning (Pacific time) I changed the nameservers on lemmy.studio, switching to a service that provides a CDN and a WAF. It's a cautionary measure to protect us from DDOS attacks. That caused some instabilities, sorry for that.

I also noticed that the CDN was too aggressive, caching URLs regardless of the Content-type, and it seems that Lemmy uses content negotiation (the same endpoint can return HTML or JSON depending on the headers). I've fixed the caching to take the headers in consideration, so hopefully you won't be seeing JSON responses when accessing the website on your desktop. If you do, let me know!

On a related note, I created a spreadsheet showing the monthly expenses on the instance, and how much we're making from user donations on Ko-fi. The sheets was shared with the current supporters. If you can spare a dollar (or five) every month to help the instance run smoothly please do, anything helps.

Thanks!

Out of all the legendary albums on this list, I doubt many of them had their origins as an abandoned rock opera. Many arrangements and scraps of Pete Townshend’s abandoned Lifehouse project became the basis for Who’s Next, an album that has no underlying theme or storyline. This sense of freedom allowed The Who to focus on making great individual songs rather than an overarching story.

The result is The Who growing up in public. The songs combine the hard-hitting energy of the band in their youth with the more experimental elements explored on Tommy. The most noticeable improvement is Roger Daltrey’s voice, reaching heights that were only hinted at in the past. Keith Moon’s drum solo followed by Daltrey’s scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” remains as one of rock’s greatest moments.

While everyone knows about the singles, from the opening keyboard of “Baba O’Riley” to the building acoustics of “Behind Blue Eyes,” every song on this record is a potential hit. Listen to the explosive chorus of “Bargain.” Check out a rare lead vocal from bassist John Entwistle on “My Wife.” With tracks like these, it’s easy to see why Who’s Next moved The Who from a great band of the ’60s to a rock superpower in the ’70s. — Joe Marvilli (2010)

Listen to it here.

Hi, folks!

Since I started lemmy.studio a lot of people have reached out offering help and financial support for our instance. While right now the hosting costs and administration efforts are mostly negligible, I want to make sure the instance can grown in a sustainable way, and I have some ideas on how to do that.

For financial support, I created a Ko-fi page. If you're not familiar with Ko-fi, they're very similar to Patreon, but the fees are optional and they pay creators immediately (not monthly). They also support one-off donations, which is nice. Right now there's a single monthly tier of $1 (though of course people can pay more, if they want).

The current monthly costs for the server, domain, and backups are around $25/month (edit: $45), and we have almost 200 users, so I'm hoping it will be relatively easier to get the costs covered. Any excess income would go towards a reserve to ensure we have a good runway and funds for upgrading the server as we grow. I'm going to create a spreadsheet and share with everyone donating, to keep this transparent.

Second, so far I've been the only administrator in our instance. The volume of reports is still small, usually a handful of spam posts per week, but as we grow we're going to need more people removing spam, banning bad actors, and ensuring we're building a supportive and encouraging culture across our communities. I'm planning to reach out to some "long-term" users that have offered help, but feel free to DM me if you want to help.

(An intermission about culture. This is a music-focused instance, and we're here to share the music we love and the music we make, and also help each other by sharing our process and tools. We're all united by the belief that music makes the world better. So let's put our differences asides, focus on what we have in common, and try to always be kind and supportive!)

Third, I've been also the only sys admin of the instance, responsible for backups and upgrades. Right now the instance is running on a personal team on Digital Ocean, together with other personal projects. My plan is to move the instance VPS to a separate team, so I can invite 1-2 people to share those responsibilities with me. Initially these would have to be voluntary, but I'm hoping that if we get enough support through Ko-fi we can compensate people doing this work.

Finally, for the long run I'd also love to set up a governance model. I'm not sure how this would work, but I'd rather have something where we can make decisions collectively.

Let me know your thoughts!

Edit: I just got my first AWS bill after switching the instance storage to S3, and while it's not bank breaking it caught me by surprise. My monthly bill is around $3-5, last month it was $28.64.

Edit 2: people are migrating to our instance from waveform.social because of malicious activity (DDOS and spurious file uploads), so if you can support the instance please do. I'm planning to move the database to a separate VPS, and maybe look into using CloudFlare to prevent us from being affected, and that will cost more money.