Meta

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

At least since this morning, but maybe also for a couple of days now (not really sure?) the ability to view a comment's parent comment has been broken. I click it and it just takes me to a page showing nothing but the comment I clicked on.

It's not just on the web that's broken, but also in Jerboa, making me think it may be a backend problem, not a problem with the UI. Though Jerboa is broken in a slightly different way, showing comments in an incorrect level of indentation.

Is everyone else experiencing this?

I was wondering whether there's any appetite to host alternative frontends? I've been using Alexandrite a bit recently, and really liking it (though would be more comfortable sending my login credentials directly to aussie.zone instead of hoping everything's legit), and some other servers are hosting that or something like Voyager for a mobile-first iOS-styled interface.

e.g.

• Voyager - https://m.lemmy.world
• Alexandrite - https://a.lemmy.world

CPU:

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Memory:

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Network:

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Storage:

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Cloudflare caching:

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Summary:

All resource usage looking stable. Storage is the only one that is trending up, as expected.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2222531

> # It's here! > > ## Download Mlem for Lemmy on the App Store > > Please note: it may take a couple minutes for it to be available in all regions. We just pressed the button. > > Mlem for Lemmy is out of beta and live on the App Store! > > Thank you to everybody who tested our app and submitted feedback, whether through TestFlight or a GitHub issue or a post on the community. Your insight has been an integral part of making this app what it is, and we look forward to working with you to make it even better in the months to come. > > The past month and a half of hard work has been an amazing journey, but this is just the beginning. We hope you give it a download and join us as we strive to bring you the best mobile Lemmy experience we can. > > Cheers, > > The Mlem Group

At this time this post supposedly has 13 comments but I only see six. I'm curious as to what's going on. Is it folks posting from instances that this instance is not federated to? Or is it because those users do not have English (or Undetermined) selected among the Settings > Languages options? Or is it a combo of both and/or some other stuff?

Are there any recommended user settings for engaging with this instance and are they posted anywhere?

More Graphs in the body.

Users: 1,736 Last 6 months active users: 676 Last month active users: 539 Posts: 2,260 Comments: 26,442

Source:https://the-federation.info/node/details/50624

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Another week... another bunch of nerd graphs!

CPU:

! Not much to say here, pretty stable CPU usage wise.

Memory:

! The unusual memory growth appears to have been related to a minor Postgres configuration change I made last week, which was reverted on Thursday. Memory usage looking much more normal since.

Network:

! As with CPU usage, network traffic is looking stable.

Storage:

! Storage growth has normalized, now that we've hit an equilibrium point. Though I'll be tweaking the object storage cache retention to minimise object storage pulls.

Cloudflare caching:

! Still saving us a large volume of egress traffic. Will save even more if particular content goes viral.

Summary:

Resource utilisation on the server is looking great across the board. No skyrocketing usage as we saw initially. Storage is still looking like the first trigger for another server upgrade, but as it is now a gradual increase we'll have plenty of fore warning and its looking like this will be some time away.

Questions? 🤓

Could you make a community for soccer?

Front page hasn't change in days and daily threads from Sunday are still trending. Both "Hot' and "Active" appear to be static lemmy-wide.

Custard is a very good Aussie indie rock band!

Doh! Forgot earlier in the night, so here you are... technically Saturday.

CPU:

! The lemmy devs have made some major strides in improving performance recently, as you can see by the overall reduced CPU load.

Memory:

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I need to figure out why swap is continuing to be used, when there is cache/buffer available to be used. But as you can see, the upgrade to 8GB of RAM is being put to good use.

Network:

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The two large spikes here are from some backups being uploaded to object storage. Apart from that, traffic levels are fine.

Storage:

! A HUGE win here this week, turns out a huge portion of the database is data we don't need, and can be safely deleted pretty much any time. The large drop in storage on the 9th was from me manually deleting all but the most recent ~100k rows in the guilty table. Devs are aware of this issue, and are actively working on making DB storage more efficient. While a better fix is being worked on, I have a cronjob running every hour to delete all but the most recent 200k rows.

Cloudflare caching:

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Cloudflare still saving us substantial egress traffic from the VPS, though no 14MB "icons" being grabbed thousands of times this week 😀

Summary:

All things considered, we're in a much better place today than a week ago. Storage is much less of a concern, and all other server resources are doing well... though I need to investigate swap usage.

Longer term it still looks as though storage will become the trigger for further upgrades. However storage growth will be much more slow and under our control. The recent upward trend is predominantly from locally cached images from object storage, which can be deleted at any time as required.

As usual, feel free to ask questions.

There have been quite a few posts in the Australia community about the upcoming referendum and naturally invite a variety of views and (mostly) interesting conversation.

Since Lemmy has nothing equivalent to post 'flairs' at this stage I think it would be helpful to have a community where people can discuss, ask questions about, share news about or share their views on the proposed constitutional amendment. The dedicated community should be changed to only allow moderators to post after the referendum is completed.

With all the talk about lemmy.ml defederating from threads I’ve been wondering what Aussie.zone’s stance is on the matter.

Noting this here for my own reference, and any other lemmy server admins that don't happen to be database administrators by day 🙂

I am not a DBA, if I'm doing something bad/incorrect here... please post! Yes, I've reset the password and TOTP token on the example account below.

2FA flags are stored in the local_user table, however that does not show usernames. To find the person_id for the user account you want to disable 2FA for, you'll need to check the person table. I'll use my test account here as an example:

SELECT * from person where name = 'guineapig' and local = 't';

Giving: !

Note the number 781227, this is the person_id for this account on my instance. To confirm: SELECT * from local_user where person_id = '781227';

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Yep, the 2FA string has the expected username in it. Now to disable 2FA on the account we need to NULL out both totp_2fa_url and totp_2fa_secret rows: UPDATE local_user SET totp_2fa_url = NULL WHERE person_id = 781227;

UPDATE local_user SET totp_2fa_secret = NULL WHERE person_id = 781227;

Should give output like this: !

And checking the local_user table again, both TOTP fields should be empty:

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I'll be upgrading lemmy to 0.18.2 shortly. Expect a minute or so downtime.

Hey I mod the adhd_australia on reddit. Can we set one up with the same name here? I'd like to direct people here as an alternative. Don't want it to be confused with other general ADHD Lemmee communities.

Could probably do with one for Autism or ASD too.

More Graphs in the post Users: 1,613 Last 6 months active users: 610 Last month active users: 608 Posts: 1,679 Comments: 18,775

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The server will be undergoing a reboot shortly to add additional RAM.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/923025

Could we get a community set up for all things coffee? There are a couple around Lemmy already, but thought there should be an aussie based community to discuss local roasters, share set ups and not wonder why everyone is posting summer drink ideas during our winter.

Happy to help moderate if needed.

I've tried signing into Memmy using:

• Server: aussie.zone
• Username: @blendedracer (as shows on my profile page)
• Password: blah blah

And it throws an error, saying it "couldn't_find_that_user-name_or_email". Should I be formatting the server and/or username differently?

I'm new to Lemmy & Aussie.Zone and have been doing some reading to better understand how it all works.

One thing that came up was that each Lemmy instance has the ability to block other instances.

I just wanted to know, does Aussie.Zone block any other instances? If so where can we see a list of these?

Another week... another set of nerd graphs!

CPU:

! Some of the variations in CPU usage in the last week correlate with upgrades to the lemmy software. If you look closely, you can see a drop in CPU usage starting late on Thursday, this was when I upgraded to 0.18.1-rc.10 which includes some major DB query optimisations.

Memory:

! The spikey memory utilisation between the 28th of June and the 4th of July were due to a lemmy software issue. It resulted in huge resource consumption for varying amounts of time, before returning to normal. This specific issue seems to have been resolved in one of the upates this week.

Network:

! The unusually high traffic levels between the 1st and 4th were caused by a large community icon.. 14MB. Thankfully, Cloudflare saved us by caching this file and saved us ~800GB of traffic on this file alone before it was shrunk to a more appropriate size 🙂

Storage:

! As expected, disk space is being used up at a relatively consistent rate. The drop on the 28th was when cached object storage images were deleted due to a server reboot that was required when adding 2 vCPUs. I have a scheduled job that runs every hour to delete cached objects older than a threshold. As the disk used by the cache increases (or the disk gets closer to being full), I'll decrease the age threshold.

Cloudflare caching:

! Cloudflare caching is saving us a lot of egress traffic. It is saving us less since the 14MB "icon" was shrunk, however this shows the value in the service. Even now, it is saving ~40GB of egress traffic per day.

Summary

Everything is looking pretty good right now, thanks mostly to the ongoing improvements in lemmy making things run more smoothly. In the next week or so I'll be upgrading the storage on the VPS to cater for the ever increasing database. Admins are already discussing ways we can manage the increasing storage requirements, I'm optimistic we'll have good solutions before we hit a VPS scaling limit.

As always, happy to answer any questions.

Noticed they are quite a large server with similar rules to ours (Be respectful, no bigotry, no porn, etc). Looking at their front page, it seems pretty tame, just anti-capitalist memes and discussion. Is there a reason we have blocked them?

About to upgrade aussie.zone to lemmy 0.18.1-rc.10 and lemmy-ui to 0.18.1-rc.10. This includes some substantial database improvements.

I'll unpin this once down... expect 2-3 minutes downtime.

Would it be possible to create a community called ServiceNow?

As reported to the lemmy devs here there is no sanity checking of links in posts currently in lemmy. Please be careful in the links you click!

Further discussion and context from the reporter here.

As far as I'm aware, these 2 communities should be kept identical by federation. The first link shows 4 posts, but the second link shows 0 posts. What could be done to fix this?

https://lemmy.ml/c/nissan_leaf https://aussie.zone/c/nissan_leaf@lemmy.ml

need pics n stuff? Some cursory steals from the net

Icon - !

Banner - https://www.icentralcoast.com/images/central-coast-best-beaches-avoca-100.jpg

A photography community would be nice to see. Not that I’m looking to step up and mod it.

Loved the old reddit one for good deals and recipies and stuff. I think there are a few on other instances but none seem to have taken off.

Another lemmy upgrade incoming, shouldn't be down more than 5 minutes. Will unpin once complete.

These communities might be/stay small, but tend to contain very useful information to those looking for it.

I'll be upgrading aussie.zone to the latest release candidate of lemmy 0.18.1 in the next 15 minutes. I expect ~2 minutes downtime.

Once complete I'll unpin this post.

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.

Hello, firstly thanks for setting up this Lemmy instace; it is growing nicely.

I've just tried searching for and subscribing to some communities hosted on programming.dev, however they are not showing up -

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Is this instance blocked from Aussie Zone? Is there somewhere we can find a list of all the instances that Aussie Zone is de-federated from?

Thanks!

In the interest of transparency, I'll be aiming to make a post at the start of each month detailing the income and expenses for the prior month as it relates to aussie.zone.

A huge thank you to everyone that has donated on my Ko-Fi page. It is because of your support that aussie.zone will continue to operate.

Income

Net donations received for June 2023 was ~$335 AUD. 🎉🎉 This is incredibly generous of everyone, especially given the current cost of living pressures we're all facing. Thank you.

When I first launched the Ko-fi page, I hadn't realised it defaulted to USD. So some donors may have unwittingly donated in USD. My apologies, I did send an email to all donors up until that point to make them aware.

A special thank you to those that have commited to contribute monthly. This is massively appreciated!

Expenses

Expenses this month were OVH hosting ($33) and Porkbun domain registration ($9). Wasabi object storage is at the end of its first month being free, and will incur costs in a week or so.

Balance

$335 - $42 = ~$293 surplus at current costs. However given the recent surge in users and their associated resource utilisation on the server, I'm expecting to upgrade the VPS in the next few weeks.

THANK YOU

I'd like to recognise and thank donors in some way. Lemmy does not currently have anything built in to recognise them that I'm aware of. I'm open to ideas. One perk I'd like to offer is an @aussie.zone email address redirect. Any donors that would like to take this up, please hit me up 😀

Only a select few have English tagged, I assume something related to no-language option is related.

I've still only read to leave the language blank on everything for now, as it is supposed to result in restricted access to content.

Edit: The user selected a language while posting, it is generally advisable that English speaking posts don't select a language at all for visibility.