Aotearoa Daily Kōrero 30/06/2023

@sortofblue · 1 year ago

Aotearoa Daily Kōrero 30/06/2023

@Dave · 1 year ago

It’s great to finally have an icon for this community! We still have a couple of “naked” communities but the majority now have icons and banner images. It’s looking good!

As boring as it sounds, my weekend plans are likely to be Lemmy related. I’d like to run some tests using Ansible to deploy Lemmy (automated rather than manual install) and then test using Ansible to update Lemmy. I’ve been getting a lot of help from @[email protected] with that but there’s not much more that can be done without me having to get my hands dirty myself.

Lemmy 0.18.1 release candidates are being released for testing so I’d guess we will get an official release this weekend based on the last few weeks.

And all this will only happen given time, since weekends mean kids are at home in need of entertainment! And school holidays are starting this weekend (last day of school today).

Aaron · 1 year ago

Lemmy related question: I was looking at a GitHub list of instances, with user counts, blocked by and blocking numbers, etc, and saw that lemmy.nz blocks 1 other instance. What instance and why?

Also, cool to see us so high up on that list when sorted by users!

@Dave · 1 year ago

What instance and why?

Lemmygrad.ml, because we don’t want that in our All feed.

There are worse instances, but if we start seeing things against our code of conduct in the All feed then I’ll add more. We want our instance to be welcoming and friendly.

Aaron · 1 year ago

Cool! Yeah I’ve heard of that one. Was that the one everyone was banning a week or two ago, and they were all upset about it?

When browsing that list, one of the top ones by users was Lemmy NSFW, but I’ve never seen a post labeled NSFW on my All feed, and I just checked both apps I’ve used (Jerboa and Liftoff) and they both have show NSFW enabled. Is that filtered or do they just have a lot of users and nothing gets posted up promoted enough to be seen? I’ve seen stuff from most of the other top instances fairly frequently.

By the way, for those interested, here’s what I was looking at: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

@Dave · 1 year ago

Cool! Yeah I’ve heard of that one. Was that the one everyone was banning a week or two ago, and they were all upset about it?

Nah, lemmygrad.ml has been around for years, is run by the founding devs of Lemmy, and is part of the reason some people refuse to use Lemmy (especially if their reasoning is the devs). You’ll find quite a few people with that viewpoint on Kbin.

When browsing that list, one of the top ones by users was Lemmy NSFW, but I’ve never seen a post labeled NSFW on my All feed, and I just checked both apps I’ve used (Jerboa and Liftoff) and they both have show NSFW enabled. Is that filtered or do they just have a lot of users and nothing gets posted up promoted enough to be seen? I’ve seen stuff from most of the other top instances fairly frequently.

When I go to the All feed right now, and choose “Top Twelve Hours”, I see one from that instance on the first page. However, it only has 85 upvotes compared to the hundreds for the top posts so maybe they struggle to get visibility.

By the way, for those interested, here’s what I was looking at: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances

In case you’re interested, the instances blocking hundreds of other instances are likely doing one of two things.

Blocking instances with thousands of user accounts and a small number of active users - there has been a spam bot boom the last week or so. These instances are often genuine but the default lemmy settings make it easy for bots to sign up. Even here I had one overnight period with 8,000 bots signing up, then I spent a while playing with settings so that we could have open registrations (they were closed for a couple of days in the last week trying to get it sorted.
Some instances are finding that failed attempts to contact other instances can lead to performance problems. e.g. if an instance used to exist and someone from that instance subscribed to a community, then your instance will keep trying to push new posts to them (and try again if it failed). So I have seen some starting to block lots of instances that used to exist and no longer do so that Lemmy doesn’t keep trying.

Both of these are likely to become an issue for us at some point, but we seem to be small enough and flying under the radar enough that neither have required too much action.

Aaron · 1 year ago

In case you’re interested, the instances blocking hundreds of other instances are likely doing one of two things.

Both cool insights, thanks! Also wow… 8,000 bots in a night lol… thanks again for running this instance, I’m sure I’m not alone in saying I appreciate it.

@Dave · 1 year ago

Not a problem, and yes you’re not alone, lots of people say that lol

@Dave · 1 year ago

BTW I just learnt that all instances have a /instances page that tells you who the site is federated with, and also who the site has blocked. Here’s ours: https://lemmy.nz/instances

@z2k_ · 1 year ago

Why ansible and not the current docker deployment?

@Dave · 1 year ago

Ansible does use docker, it’s almost the same thing but automated.

The main driver originally was because the ansible setup seems to be kept up to date where as following the manual docker install instructions leads to many things not set up right because they haven’t been kept up to date (admittedly it’s getting better).

The update instructions are pretty brief. It basically says to update the docker tags to point to the new version. This did not work for 0.18.0 because there we other changes. Having an ansible update process would hopefully make things easier in terms of updates. It also means the setup would be exactly like what they expect, currently we have a few differences (e.g. reverse proxy running traefik in docker).