Hey folks!

So far, I have been the sole admin at lemm.ee. Most reports I receive don't really require any action from me - they are handled directly by moderators of the communities the reports originate from. Still, there is a chance that any reported post might contain content which would need to be purged from lemm.ee servers, so even reports that don't need any action should still be checked by an admin.

The volume of incoming issues has been quite manageable so far, but I have noticed a steady increase in daily reports lately. Additionally, there is nobody covering the report queue while I am sleeping or otherwise unable to access my computer.

I would like to ensure that there is a bit more redundancy in the admin team, so I am looking to potentially add one or two admins. Specifically, I am looking for somebody who would be willing to share the following responsibilities (copied from our administration policy):

Admins

• Ensure that there are no communities on lemm.ee which break lemm.ee rules
• Ban lemm.ee users who break our rules on other instances
• Ban users who consistently break rules across multiple communities
• Purge illegal content from lemm.ee

Note: I am not looking for help with system administration work at this time, this is strictly about administration within Lemmy itself.

Please be aware that being an admin is unfortunately quite a thankless job - if you're doing your job well, then most people won't even realize you're doing anything. OTOH, if you make mistakes, there will likely be many users calling you out in public. The main motivation for joining the admin team would need to be a desire to help build and maintain this instance as a great home for yourself and others.

If there is anybody who would be interested in helping out even despite the above disclaimer, please leave a comment with the following info:

• On a typical day, during what hours are you active on lemm.ee (with timezone info)
• Do you have any previous experience with moderation/administration
• Are you in agreement with the current state of the lemm.ee administration policy

Context

There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.

The lemm.ee federation policy states that it's not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it's likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.

However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.

Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse

• As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.
• Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
• Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
• In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

By the way, we're not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation

• Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
• Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
• We don't really know what to defederate from - it's completely possible that "threads.net" will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.

So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.

Update:

By now, it's clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):

• lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
• Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads

While it seems to be a minority, it's still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.

A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.

The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:

• The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
• Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
• We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook

Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option

In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:

• There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
• Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
• There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)

Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.

Again, I realize this approach won't please everybody, but I really believe it's the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.

👋 to all the newcomers, let me know if you need any help getting settled in!

Hey lemmings!

I wanted to share a quick update about our recent performance issues and how I have addressed them.

The last 24h have been a bit rough for lemm.ee.

Last night, I spent some time debugging federation issues with lemmy.world. We managed to significantly improve the situation - lemmy.world content is now reaching lemm.ee with a very high success rate - but this has had the effect of increasing incoming federation traffic on our servers significantly.

Additionally, we have been seeing steadily increasing normal user traffic over the past week, which is awesome from a community standpoint, but of course means that our servers have to do more work to keep up with all the new people.

To top things off, today there appeared a badly configured instance in the network, which was effectively launching a DoS attack against lemm.ee for several hours. Most likely it was unintentional, but unfortunately the end result was a sudden increase in our server load.

All these factors combined resulted in a really bad experience for most lemm.ee users today. Page load times have consistently been spiking into as much as 10 seconds or more for the whole day:

In fact, a lot of page loads just timed out with errors.

Fortunately, it seems I have managed to clear up the problems!

I have put a bunch of mitigations in place, and after monitoring the situation for the past hour, it seems that our performance issues have been resolved for now. So hopefully, you can enjoy browsing lemm.ee again without it feeling like torture!

Here are specific steps I took:

• I have doubled the hardware resources for our backend servers and database.
• I purchased a Cloudflare pro subscription for lemm.ee for 1 year. This took out a considerable chunk of my budget for lemm.ee, but in return it will allow me to analyze and optimize our cache usage to a far greater extent. I am already seeing vastly reduced load times for cacheable content (try opening https://lemm.ee a few times in a row as a logged out user - it should be blazing fast now!)
• I have configured a rate limiter which will prevent future DoS from the specific method that was used against us today.

Of course, all of the above is costly. Luckily, lemm.ee users have been very generous with donations in the month of June, and in fact a significant amount of donors have opted for monthly recurring contributions. This all gives me the confidence to increase our spending for now, and I am currently expecting to NOT increase my personal planned contribution of 150€/month, as the increased costs so far are entirely being covered by donations!

Let me take this opportunity to thank the sponsors who made the upgrades possible! All lemm.ee users are now enjoying better performance thanks to you, I could not have done it without you awesome people.

On a final note, I just want to say that I hope a lot of these issues can be solved by optimizations in Lemmy software itself in the future. I have been personally contributing several optimizations to the Lemmy codebase, and I know many others are focused on optimizations as well. Just throwing extra resources at the problem will probably not be a sustainable solution for very long 😅. But I am optimistic that we are moving in the right direction with the software changes, and we'll be enjoying reduced resource needs before long.

That's all I wanted to share today, I wish you all a great weekend!

Update: The maintenance has been completed!

Welcome to 0.18.1! Hopefully you'll notice some much needed UI tweaks as well as several performance optimizations.

I am still going through things and making sure everything looks good, but so far, I have not detected any major issues (fingers crossed). If you do have any problems, please comment below!

Original annoucenemnt below:

0.18.1 is coming!

As I mentioned in a previous post, this upgrade will require brief downtime. I will try to keep it as short as possible, but I can't guarantee an exact window, so if you really can't wait for lemm.ee to be back online, then the best advice I can give is to check back every 5 minutes or so.

As with any update, please be prepared for unexpected side-effects. If we find any major issues, then we can always roll back to good old 0.17.4. If we just find some minor issues, then most likely the overall experience will still be better on 0.18.1, so in that case we stay on 0.18.1 and try to get any potential issues fixed in 0.18.2. In either case, if you see anything weird after the upgrade, please report in the comments!

Administration, moderation, and federation policy for lemm.ee

This post aims to clarify principles for how administration and federation is done on lemm.ee. It is intended to be an overview of general guidelines, not a formal set of rules.

Instance rules

This instance (like most others) has a set of rules which are always visible on the sidebar of the front page. All users of this instance are expected to follow these rules in all of their activities, including:

• Community moderation
• Posting
• Commenting

⚠️ Our rules apply even when you're posting in a community on another instance. For example, this means that you're not allowed to post advertisement spam using your lemm.ee account on any other instance (even if that other instance has no rules).

Each community hosted on lemm.ee is free to have additional rules in addition to our instance wide rules, but instance rules supercede any community rules and must always be enforced.

Responsibilities

Admins

• Ensure that there are no communities on lemm.ee which break lemm.ee rules
• Ban lemm.ee users who break our rules on other instances
• Ban users who consistently break rules across multiple communities
• Purge illegal content from lemm.ee

Moderators

• Ensure that posts and comments in their communities don't break rules
• Ban users from their communities for consistently breaking rules
• Ensure that they only provide accurate and clear reasons for mod actions

Users

• Downvote low quality content
• Report rule violations

⚠️ Admins are not responsible for censoring content from other instances.

In exceptional cases (illegal or extremely disturbing content), admins will step in and purge the content from lemm.ee servers, but in general it is undestood that our instance rules do not apply to external users on other instances, and censoring and curating external instances for our users is not a general goal for lemm.ee admins.

Federation

Lemmy is a federated network, so a lot of content will be posted on other instances. It is possible to limit which instances lemm.ee is federated with, this is called defederation.

Defederating another instance has the following effects:

• Our users will stop seeing new posts and comments from users of the defederated instance (on all instances)
• Users of the defederated instance will stop seeing new posts and comments from our users
• Users of the defederated instance will be prevented from participating in communities hosted on lemm.ee

As mentioned above, it is not a goal for lemm.ee to censor and curate external instances. While there are certainly instances which contain content that wouldn't be allowed on this instance, breaking our rules outside of this instance is not by itself enough of a reason for us to defederate other instances.

That being said, we will defederate any instance which is directly harming lemm.ee users. This is up to the discretion of our admins. Some concrete examples of instances which we would defederate:

• An instance which has a 2:1 ratio of bots to users 🤖
• An instance which is focused on creating spam in the network
• An instance which systematically allows large groups of users to break lemm.ee rules in communities hosted on lemm.ee
• An instance which is knowingly spreading CSAM into the federated network

What should I do if I see content I don't like on another instance?

• If it's low quality content, you should always downvote ⬇️
• If you think it breaks local rules for the community or instance, then report it and local admins/mods will deal with it
  • Your reports will also reach lemm.ee admins, so if it's about illegal content, then we can purge it from lemm.ee servers
• If it's just some user being a prick, then you can block that specific user (lemm.ee admins will not take action in case of external users posting on external communities)
• If it's a community dedicated to being awful in some way, then you can block that specific community

Today, a bunch of new instances appeared in the top of the user count list. It appears that these instances are all being bombarded by bot sign-ups.

For now, it seems that the bots are especially targeting instances that have:

• Open sign-ups
• No captcha
• No e-mail verification

I have put together a spreadsheet of some of the most suspicious cases here.

If this is affecting you, I would highly recommend considering one of the following options:

1. Close sign-ups entirely
2. Only allow sign-ups with applications
3. Enable e-mail verification + captcha for sign-ups

Additionally, I would recommend pre-emptively banning as many bot accounts as possible, before they start posting spam!

Please comment below if you have any questions or anything useful to add.

Update: on lemm.ee, I have defederated the most suspicious spambot-infested instances.

To clarify: this means small instances with an unnaturally fast explosion in user counts over the past day and very little organic activity. I plan to federate again if any of these instances get cleaned up. I have heard that other instances are planning (or already doing) this as well.

It's not a decision I took lightly, but I think protecting users from spam is a very important task for admins. Full info here: https://lemm.ee/post/197715

If you're an admin of an instance that's defederated from lemm.ee but wish to DM me, you can find me on Matrix: @sunaurus:matrix.org

Hello, fellow lemmings!

As I promised in my previous update, lemm.ee has enabled support for image uploads for all images up to 100kb! First and foremost, this means that you should now be able to upload avatars for yourself and your communities.

Why only 100kb?

From discussions with other instance admins, I have learned that one of the scaling issues so far with Lemmy is multimedia storage. Several instances report growing their storage by significant amounts daily - if we grew at that same pace, I would start seeing increased infrastructure bills very quickly (within months, if not weeks).

This is why I am hoping to keep it under control by limiting the upload size and asking users to use external image hosting providers as much as possible for now. I will keep monitoring our storage growth, and if it turns out that it's manageable, then I will gradually start increasing the upload limit.

100kb was specifically chosen as it SHOULD cover most needs for any avatars, and possibly even simple banners for communities. I'm definitely open to feedback - please let me know if there are any specific cases where you desperately need a bigger limit!

How can I post images hosted on external services?

For posts, just submit the image URL directly (in other words, copy the image URL into the "URL" field of the post you are creating).

For text posts and comments, you can use the following syntax: ![alt text](image url), for example ![lemm.ee logo](https://imgur.com/earIilI.png) results in:

Other updates

• I have noticed some CPU usage spikes in our hardware monitoring, especially during the last 24h, so today I upgraded our servers to be a bit more beefy. My goal is to pre-empt any noticeable slowdowns, so if I do my job right with upgrades, you guys will never even know that there was a problem. If you do ever notice significant slowdowns, please always let me know directly and I can take a look!
• Several people have kindly signalled their willingness to share the infrastructure costs of this instance. These people would enable us to grow much more without running into budget constraints, so I am planning to investigate what my options are for setting up a system of donations within the coming days. Thanks a lot to everybody who has messaged me about this!

The other thread about favorite mechanics is great, so let's also do the opposite: what are some of your most hated mechanics?

Some projects have a public roadmap or a list of priorities that give an idea of the direction that the maintainers want to take.

Is there anything like this for Lemmy currently?

Welcome!

Due the recent high amount of users coming over from Reddit, many of the existing large Lemmy instances have been struggling to keep up. This instance was created to help spread out the load on the Lemmy network. Lemmy newbies are welcome here.

The goal for lemm.ee is to provide a home Lemmy instance for anybody that needs one. That means that you are more than welcome here even if you mostly intend to just interact with other instances rather than this one!

Note: if you want to start up a new community here, but the name is already taken by an inactive community, then don't worry! Inactive communities can be transferred to new moderators. Please follow the steps outlined in our FAQ under the "How can I take over an inactive community" section.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a federated link aggregator. This image explains it pretty well! In general, the fact that it's "federated" just means that it works much like e-mail - in the same way as a Gmail user can send e-mails to iCloud Mail users or Outlook users, a lemm.ee user is able to participate in communities on many different Lemmy instances. Regardless of which Lemmy instance your account lives on, you are a part of the federated network and can interact with other users from other instances, so this instance is as good of a place as any other to get started with Lemmy.

If you have any further questions about Lemmy, please check out our guide/FAQ!

About lemm.ee (this instance)

lemm.ee is intended to be a serious long-term instance, not just some random experiment.

You can always find the most up to date rules and general info about lemm.ee in the sidebar on our front page. If you want to know more about how this instance is run, you can check our administration and federation policy.

For some technical background, this instance is operated following industry best practices:

• Our infrastructure is robust and has been built up with redundancy and recoverability in mind
• The servers are running in the cloud (this is not some bedroom server situation!)
• All of the infrastructure is described declaratively as code, which allows relatively quick and safe changes to any part of our infrastructure whenever necessary
• Our entire database is backed up constantly, so in the worst case, we can always restore our data

A significant chunk of funding for this infrastructure comes directly from our amazing community. This support is essential to help secure our future. These supporters deserve the gratitude of all lemm.ee users!

You can read more details about how our instance is funded on this GitHub sponsorships page. There is also a Ko-Fi donations page as a back-up.

If it sounds like lemm.ee might be the right instance for you, then you are welcome to join us!