There isn’t any way to do this with the default lemmy-ui unfortunately

For now, I just redeployed all of our servers completely, but as I don’t know the actual root cause of the issue yet, I’m still investigating to figure out if anything more is needed.

Sorry for the delay in updating the status page - I actually had gone out for lunch just a few minutes before the downtime started, so I didn’t even realize anything was up until I was back at my computer about 45 minutes later 💀

Actually, we’re using Hetzner’s cloud load balancer for lemm.ee. But if this issue repeats in the near future, then I will definitely consider setting up something else.

There are two useful sections on https://status.lemm.ee for this - firstly, there is an automated check for federation with all other instances on the bottom of the page, and everything there being red is a definite sign that something is wrong with lemm.ee itself. Secondly, near the top of that page, I will always write a status message manually when I discover & start work on any issues. This second part can have a bit of a delay, as it requires manual input from myself, but I have updated it every time we had any issues so far.

I believe I discovered and fixed one cause for intermittent slow page loads, but please let me know if you notice it again in the near future

The maximum file size limit for images hosted directly on lemm.ee servers is always visible in the sidebar of our front page. The limit stands at 500kb per image currently.

Additionally, It’s also possible to post images larger than 500kb, they just have to be hosted externally. The markdown for this is ![alt text](image url)

It’s not really a bug, it’s just a case where app developers need to update their code to support a small change in the Lemmy API. More details here: https://lemm.ee/post/34259050/12479585

Hey, this post is quite old, actually you can find the latest info in the sidebar of our front page:

• Image uploads are enabled 4 weeks after account creation
• Image upload limit is 500kb per image

I have identified two reasons for broken thumbnails right now:

1. For some, the source website is simply not allowing our server to download the image (mostly due to server issues on the remote side)
2. For others, it seems that some types of URLs are breaking thumbnail generation. I think I found the bug here and will try to submit a fix soon.

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

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.

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.

It’s the first option in the dropdown:

Big thanks to all maintainers and contributors!

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).

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.

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.

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 https://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!