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.
I had emergency cosmetic surgery after my accident and remember up to the anaesthesia counting down from ten to about four, and then waking up afterwards.
We aren’t defeferated from them. That’s different from hosting that content ourselves though.
I’m not personally against piracy, however hosting that kind of content here ourselves would put our primary reason for creating this space (that of providing a safe social space for trans and LGBTQIA+ people) at risk.
I just wanted to point that out before we get a whole bunch of piracy subs created on our instance that we’d have to remove.
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?
I would like to acknowledge here that Ada and I, while being part of a marginalized community are both still very privileged.
I also want to make clear that I’m not saying that you need to have decades of experience, or the means to cover the costs by yourself, but rather wanted to point out it’s a hard job and you need to have (multiple, qualified) people to do the job for a larger instance. There may also be times when the donations don’t 100% cover the costs, and you’ll need to have a plan when this happens.
Unfortunately multiply intersectional marginalized people have a lot harder time getting that experience and to have a means to fund such instances. It can additonally be a lot harder for them to find opportunities to gain this experience.
If you do find yourself in a similar situation, and would like an opportunity to gain some experience/training in a LGBTQIA+ / neuro-diverse / marginalized people-friendly community project, please message myself or @ada and we may be able to help.
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.
We have already begun moving, and this announcement was to warn our users about future downtime as we migrate more critical services like databases etc.
I suddenly have a little widget called Eruda on Lemmy pages and cannot seem to disable, and did not install this myself. Any ideas? Not sure where else to post.
Most uses of the misnomer “transphobia” are actually incorrect, because the people involved aren’t actually suffering from an irrational medical or psychological fear of transgender people.
What they actually are doing is more accurately called “transmisia”, because they are transmisic. This means they are heavily prejudiced against transgender women and believe that they shouldn’t be involved in the competitions.
Their reason for this are not because the transgender women don’t meet the beauty standards, or aren’t passing the judging categories, but because they just don’t want them there purely due to their trans-mysogynistic preconceptions.
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....
How long did it take to regain your memory after surgery?
Sorry if this does fit here, or make sense couldn’t find an ask docs community with my tired 1am brain....
deleted_by_author
Updating lemmy version in 10 minutes
The server will be briefly down while we install a new updated version of lemmy and restart it....
The rule of growth (i.imgur.com)
I’d like to thank the admins for being so open and direct about the issues that they’re facing.
State of the shork!
So it’s been a few days, where are we now?...
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.
Eruda on Lemmy pages?
I suddenly have a little widget called Eruda on Lemmy pages and cannot seem to disable, and did not install this myself. Any ideas? Not sure where else to post.
Trans men enter Miss Italy contest to protest anti-trans ‘women from birth’ rule (sh.itjust.works)
More details: thepinknews.com/…/miss-italy-trans-men-trans-wome…
Lemmy updated to v0.18.2
Our lemmy is now running the 0.18.2 release version, which should fix some lingering issues we’ve been having....
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....
Error in DB: Storage Full
Seems that some hard drive filled up and I can’t upload images.
Blåhaj Lemmy hacked
Hi everyone....