sunaurus

sunaurus, 4 days ago

By the way, as a mini-present, I have sneakily updated our Lemmy to 0.19.4! It was possible to do this one without any downtime, so I just did it quietly in the background.

sunaurus, 4 days ago

Basically, yes!

For the backend: our traffic is load balanced between multiple servers, so I can just spin up a new server with the latest version of Lemmy, add it to the load balancer, and then start taking down the servers with older versions. That way, there is no disruption at all for users, because there is always a server available to handle incoming traffic. The only requirement for this is that the new version of Lemmy can’t have database migrations which break the old running servers.

For lemmy-ui: it’s a bit more complicated, because even with a load balancer, it’s still possible that one user making multiple sequential requests can end up getting responses from different servers. This is problematic, because during an upgrade, files from the new version are not available on the old servers, and vice versa. Fortunately, there are many ways to solve this problem, for lemm.ee, the solution I use is to just always serve lemmy-ui files from object storage, for all versions. In other words, after I upload lemmy-ui files for a new version, these will immediately also be available on old servers.

sunaurus, 4 days ago

Sure, the lemm.ee federation policy is here. You can also always find a link to it in the sidebar on our front page.

sunaurus, 6 days ago

Big thanks to all maintainers and contributors!

sunaurus, 5 days ago

It’s the first option in the dropdown:

https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/330f378a-9655-4084-b38d-7b8dc38c4f11.webp

sunaurus, 7 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

While there isn’t any built-in ban appeal in Lemmy, there are still a few ways to reach lemm.ee admins even after a full ban: creating a new account (as you did), contacting me on Matrix (I am @sunaurus:matrix.org), or contacting the admins on Discord (there is an invite to the lemm.ee Discord in the sidebar of this community).

sunaurus, 18 days ago

We’ve been stable just around 200€ per month for most of this year (it fluctuates up and down a little bit depending on exact usage). I update status.lemm.ee once every month with expected running costs for that month, and while it hasn’t changed much in the past months, if it does ever change, you’ll find up to date info there!

sunaurus, 18 days ago

We have about 3.3k monthly active users. This is based on users who at least vote/comment/post once a month, so it doesn’t include lurkers. But yeah, in terms of just infrastructure costs, we’re at about 6 cents per active user per month.

sunaurus, 17 days ago

Well, one advantage we have over commercial social media is that they need to pay people to write code and maintain the infrastructure, but a lot of work on Lemmy is volunteer-based.

Many admins for bigger instances are basically on-call the whole year for free, open source contributors provide code for free, etc. Even the core maintainers are effectively losing money by working on Lemmy, because while they are getting some income, the sum of money they are getting from working on Lemmy is way smaller than what they would get if they worked typical software engineering jobs.

Basically, if any non-volunteer organization wanted to replicate Lemmy, it would cost them quite a bit more in terms of payroll alone.

Another aspect is scale - Lemmy is able to spread the costs between different instances, and while growth of the network can generally increase costs for individual nodes, they will still end up paying less compared to if they were hosting the entire social network in a centralized way.

sunaurus, 18 days ago

Hey, this should be fixed now!

sunaurus, 18 days ago

This should be fixed, let me know if you’re still seeing issues!