We’re currently in the process of migrating our pict-rs service (the thing responsible for storing media/images/uploads etc) to the new infrastructure....
It brings Ada and I a whole heap of pleasure running these instances and it’s largely knowing that we’re making a difference to our users, and providing a safe space for you all to grow and flourish that makes it all worth it for us.
I have been watching my love tie herself in knots over the last several days, having to deal with the drama that has been brought on, trying her best to bring everyone back together.
There’s been bad behaviour from both sides, and I’m really disappointed to see that some of the worst of it came from our users, who didn’t keep to the moral high ground, disregarded our instance rules and stoopped to levels of behaviour worse than that leveled against them.
There have been accusations against us (or Ada specifically) that we are a safe harbour for bad behaviour and cause harm to trans people through our inaction.
This is perhaps the cruelest accusation they could have leveled at Ada, as she works tirelessly to maintain a safe space for our community, and while I was hoping, for all the effort that she was investing into this issue, that she could make it work despite my own reservations, this last attack on her impeccable morality has made me very angry.
I’m sorry for those that wanted to remain federated, sorry that it came to this, but I am glad it’s over now, purely for the mental health of my precious beloved.
So, one thing I’d mention is the systems and admin work involved in running an instance.
This is on top of the community moderation, and involves networking with other instance admins, maintaining good relations, deciding who to defeferate from, dealing with unhappy users, etc.
Then there’s the setup and maintenance of the servers, security, hacks, DDoSing, backups, redundancy, monitoring, downtime, diagnosis, fixing performance issues, patching, coding, upgrades etc.
I wouldn’t be here doing this without @ada. We make a formidable team, and without any self effacement, we are both at the top of our respective roles with decades of experience.
Big communities also magnify the amount of work involved. We’re almost at the point where we are starting to consider getting additional people involved.
Moreover we’re both here for the long haul, with the willingness and ability to personally cover the shortfall in hosting costs.
I’m not trying to convince you to stay here. But in addition to free hardware, you’re going to need a small staff to do these things for you, so my advice is to work out if you have reliable AND trustworthy people (because these people will have access to confidential user data) who are committed to do this work long term with you. Where will you be in 3 years, 5, 10?
To be clear, $3k is an accurate, but unacceptable amount.
As in that’s what it’s actually costing us, but it’s not what it should be costing. I’d imagine more like $250 is what we should be paying if I wasn’t using AWS in the silly way I am.
I’m admitting up front that I’ve been more focused on developing rather than optimising operating costs because I could afford to be a little frivolous with the cost in exchange for not having to worry about doing server stuff.
Even when the Reddit thing happened I was wilfully ignoring it, trying to solve the scaling issues instead of focusing on the increased costs.
And so I didn’t notice when Lemmy was pushing a terabyte of data out of the ELB a day. And that’s what got me.
About half that $3k is just data transfer costs.
Anyhow the notice was just to let our users know what is going on and that there’ll be some maintenance windows in their future so it doesn’t surprise anyone.
We have a plan and it will all work out.
Don’t panic or have any kneejerk reactions, it’s just an FYI.
It wasn’t an actual emojo. The script processed the SQL header column names as an emojo and tried to add them. Unfortunately publicUrl is not a valid URL, so lemmy’s /api/v3/site metadata endpoint started returning an error relative URL without a base instead of the JSON that the website was expecting and so the site just stopped working for everyone the next time it tried to load that url.
We will be adding some extra buffer to our hardware and upgrading the the 0.18.1 release candidate in order to prepare for the possible membership surge.
Alternative frontends
Hi all our lovely users,...
¡La mariposa, muy bonita! (lemmy.blahaj.zone) Spanish
Esto es una prueba
Testing image upload (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Test
Migration of pict-rs server [completed]
We’re currently in the process of migrating our pict-rs service (the thing responsible for storing media/images/uploads etc) to the new infrastructure....
Lemmy database migration (maintenance, downtime)
Blåhaj Lemmy will be down for database migration to the new servers in approximately 1.5 hours from now (06:00 UTC)....
Admin update - Hexbear Defederated
This is an admin post, intended for blahaj lemmy users. Top level posts from members of other instances will be removed....
Updating lemmy version in 10 minutes
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VERY IMPORTANT POLL RESULTS: STAYING ON BLAHAJ.ZONE!!! (THANK GOODNESS)
Edit edit: pls stop voting we already decided. read the post title. I love blahaj.zone and personally wanted to stay....
The seriouspost state of the union. (aka what do we do now?) PLEASE READ.
Here’s a few things that are happening that I feel should be addressed:...
State of the nation. (blahaj.zone)
Discussion of the current situation with the Blåhaj instances, and upcoming maintenance.
Lemmy updated to v0.18.2
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Migrating database at 23:00 UTC
Hi everyone, I’ll begin migrating the lemmy blåhaj database to the new server this morning in about 20 minutes....
Broken emojo caused site outage,
I have a process which copies emojos from the hajkey blahaj.zone site to our lemmy....
Blåhaj Lemmy hacked
Hi everyone....
New emojos!
All our Blåhaj zone Hajkey emojo’s are now cloned here on Lemmy!...
(Completed) In approximately an hour Blåhaj Lemmy will be down for up to an hour to for premptive upgrades
We will be adding some extra buffer to our hardware and upgrading the the 0.18.1 release candidate in order to prepare for the possible membership surge.
Blåhaj Lemmy upgraded and migrated
Hey everyone,...