Our servers are currently in Finland, but this is subject to change if necessary for financial/technical reasons. We've also used German servers in the past for example. In general we're definitely staying in the EU, though.
sunaurus
joined 2 years ago
Hi folks!
Over the past few months, we have started seeing a significant amount of new user sign-ups. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all of our new members, and to share some useful resources and info about lemm.ee.
First, some stats
Here is a bar chart of daily new users (this is only counting users which have been approved by our admins):
As you can see from the chart, for most of 2024, we were accepting roughly around 10-20 new users every day. Then, from the start of this year, the daily numbers have been constantly growing. Yesterday, we approved a massive 609 new users on lemm.ee.
The increase in sign-ups is significant enough that I have been taking several steps to improve our monitoring & anti-bot measures, but so far, it seems the vast majority of the new users are completely legitimate real humans! (Thank you all for not being bots 😅)
About lemm.ee
This Lemmy instance is turning 2 years old very soon. It was initially created around the time of the Reddit API changes, when existing Lemmy servers were getting overloaded with new users - lemm.ee was intended to help spread the load. We're now the second largest Lemmy server when it comes to monthly active users.
Our core philosophy for this instance has always been to treat it as a generic gateway to the Lemmy network. I want to provide our users a stable and reliable home for their Lemmy account, so that they can have easy access to all of their communities, regardless of what instance the community is actually hosted on.
We run on some decently beefy hardware, and our setup is fairly customized in several ways in order to ensure a smooth experience for our users (most of the time, this has worked out quite well!). Our servers are currently hosted in Finland.
Our infrastructure has been funded by the community almost from the start through GitHub sponsorships and Ko-Fi donations. I am sure I speak on behalf all of our users when I say that I am extremely grateful to all supporters - you are really responsible for the continued existence of this instance!
Lemmy itself is open source software, and while it has improved massively during the time I have been using it, it definitely still has some rough edges. Please be patient when using Lemmy, and remember that it is being built collaboratively by humans (not corporations), without any intent of ever turning it into a business.
Useful resources
- If you're confused about anything, feel free to check out our F.A.Q.
- We have an instance policy for administration, moderation, and federation - feel free to check it out if you want to understand how admins and mods are expected to act on lemm.ee
- For staying up to date with instance news, feel free to subscribe to !meta@lemm.ee
- If you ever can't reach lemm.ee, please check our status page at https://status.lemm.ee/ - I communicate updates on that page when dealing with any unplanned problems.
- You can always find these resources (and some more useful info) in the sidebar of our front page (https://lemm.ee/)!
Don't forget to participate!
Communities on Lemmy only work if people actively use them. Even upvoting/downvoting based on quality of content is a great start, but I would really like to encourage you all to comment and even write posts, because that's really the best way to build communities.
If you have any questions or thoughts about lemm.ee or Lemmy in general, feel free to post a comment below this post, and myself or one of our veteran users will definitely respond.
I hope you enjoy your time on lemm.ee, and I wish you all a great week!
lemm.ee hosts a conservative community, which on occasion features borderline transphobia and homophobia.
Hi, lemm.ee admin here, please be sure to report any cases of community moderators not following lemm.ee instance rules directly to admins. The "no bigotry" rule is a treated very seriously at lemm.ee, and our admins will always handle such cases very harshly. We have in the past had to shut down a few conservative-type communities over such things. Having said that, I am not aware of the current moderators of that community allowing, much less featuring, any kind of bigotry (in fact, a quick look over the mod log shows them actively removing bigotry, usually posted by users from outside lemm.ee).
By the way, I know there are a lot of users on Lemmy who really enjoy starting defederation drama (I've lost count at this point of how many users like you I've seen), but is there really nothing better you could be doing on a Friday evening? Maybe go for a walk, spend time with some close ones, read a book, whatever. You are not gaining absolutely anything from what you are trying to do here.
Hi, there is no free speech policy on lemm.ee, we have very strict moderation when it comes to our rules. We regularly permaban users for breaking our instance rules. We simply don't use defederation as a moderation tool, preferring other tools like user bans, for reasons outlined here: https://lemm.ee/post/35472386
Interesting! We've had quite a noticeable spike of sign-ups on lemm.ee as well
Hey! I'm not really sure about this at the moment. I can tell you that if the authors (or any legal entity) would contact me about this and ask for links to be removed, then I would comply, rather than try to fight it.
I think it's not really on your side, most likely either just something wrong on kbin.social itself, OR a side-effect of the measures lemmy.world implemented against kbin.social recently.
They are basically local-only communities on lemmy.world at this point, unfortunately. There is no federation to any other instance for any lemmy.world user posts on those communities.
I think there are two separate things I want to address here:
First, agile isn't a project management methodology, it's just a set of 4 abstract priorities and 12 abstract principles. It's very short, you can check it out here:
Nothing here says that you're not allowed to write documentation, write down requirements, etc. In fact, the principles encourage you yourself as a software team to create the exact processes and documentation that you need in order to meet your goals.
"Working software over comprehensive documentation" does not mean you aren't allowed to have documentation, it just means that you should only write documentation if it helps you build working software, rather than writing documentation for the sake of bureaucracy.
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" does not mean that you should have no processes, it just means that the individuals in your team should be empowered to collaboratively create whatever processes you need to deliver good software.
Secondly, in terms of practical advice:
- Talk about this problem with your team. Is it hard for others to figure out where requirements came from? Maybe they already have a good method and can share it with you. If it's hard for everybody, then propose improvements to your process, for example, propose some type of design document process as part of building any new features
- There are no perfect answers to the question of "how do I safely make non-trivial changes to systems", but the general approach is to ensure that:
a. You have metrics about how your system is used.
b. You have automated tests covering any requirements, so that you can feel confident when making changes to one part of the system that it isn't violating any unrelated requirements.
c. You actually document any confusing parts in the code itself using comments. The most important thing to cover in comments is "why is this logic necessary?" - whenever something is confusing, you need to answer this question with a comment. Otherwise, the system becomes very annoying to change later on.
If you are missing any of the above, then propose to your team that you start doing it ASAP
- At the end of the day, somebody is responsible for making product decisions. Is it your team? Or maybe some separate product owner? Sometimes, you just need to communicate with whoever is responsible to figure out if any requirements are still relevant, or if they are now safe to change.
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
Regarding your question:
Lemmy federation basically works by copying stuff from their source instance to all other federated instances. So if I write a comment on lemm.ee, other federated instances will get their own copy of my comment. They will also all know that the "authority" for this comment is lemm.ee.
If an admin on another instance decides to delete their local copy of my comment on lemm.ee, then they are always free to do so (for example, some instances might want to moderate more strictly), but any actions they take like this are limited to their own instance - for the rest of Lemmy, lemm.ee remains the authority for this comment, so individual remote instance admins taking actions won't have any effect on any other instances.
As for the original topic of modlog federation, basically it just boils down to this: just like with the comment example above, Lemmy instances also save a local copy of incoming federated mod logs. The Lemmy software does not yet have 100% coverage in terms of federating mod logs (for example, there are no federated logs yet for instance admins banning remote users), but this coverage has been increasing, and I expect this will eventually get to 100% (just needs more dev time really).
Also, if some instance admins try to tamper with their mod logs, then other instances can still see the real history, because there is no way for an instance admin to delete copies of their mod log from other instances.
Banning a local user from a local community does actually federate already
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We'll get some more control over images when 1.0 comes, I will take a look at it again then, but in general the new user cooldown for image uploads has really significantly reduced the amount of image related abuse we have seen.
@Character_Locked@lemm.ee please understand, nobody on our admin team is getting paid to moderate disgusting images, they are volunteering to do it, and it takes a mental toll. Also, image hosting itself is not free. Our donations right now are barely breaking even with server costs. So realistically, our options are not "current situation vs fully unrestricted image uploads", they are "current situation vs completely burned out admin team and costs increasing beyond donations".