What happened?

Our SSL certificate expired, which rendered our instance unusable - that is, no content would load.

Why'd it happen?

We're not 100% sure. NGINX Proxy Manager is supposed to renew the certificate automatically, but it didn't. I'm suspecting this has something to do with how I've set it up. I'll need a bit of time to investigate further.

Why'd you take soo long to fix it?

Busy with IRL work, and didn't notice it. I haven't had time to jump onto Lemmy in the last 24 hours.

What steps are you taking to ensure this doesn't happen again?

I'll be adding the Lemmy instance to my UptimeKuma server to monitor the cert expiry, and give me notice before it expires. If I can't figure out why it's not renewing automatically, I'll renew the certificate before it expires again.

Unfortunately, some people have decided to post CSAM on remote instances. The moderators of the communities have been very proactive, but because of the federated nature of Lemmy, it means the material had federated.

So like most instances are doing, we've initiated a purge on the pictrs database/filesystem to delete ALL images from the last 24 hours.

Images may appear broken. I'd like to apologise for the inconvenience, but as Lodion said best on his post in !meta@aussie.zone - "... this is pretty much the nightmare scenario for an instance. I’d rather nuke all images ever than to host such content."

It's pretty disgusting.

For fellow Lemmy admins who are curious, the script to delete is:

sudo find /srv/lemmy/example.com/volumes/pictrs/files -type f -ctime -1 -exec shred {} \;

Be sure to modify the path to point to your pictrs directory!

As per the title, 0.18.4 was released a few days ago and we'll be updating to it in the next hour.

As usual, attached is an overview of the (new) server! Barely a scratch so far. Everything is running optimally.

Thanks for all your support! ❤️

Kinda. There are a few small issues to still figure out, but for the most part we're back and should be federating.

I'll be working over the coming hours to finalise things and fix the niggly errors.

If you notice any errors, please message me or post here.

Cheers!

Hopefully you won't notice much downtime, because it's going to be a relatively simple migration. But if you do notice, apologies in advance!

I plan on doing the migration within the next 24 hours. Possibly sooner. Can't give an exact time at the moment, but check the comments. I'll post updates here.

As per the title, we've just upgraded the instance to 0.18.3. Hopefully this'll fix the database taking up enormous amounts of space!

I've also attached some graphs of the instance's status for the nerds out there.

If you notice any issues, please let us know!

Thanks ❤️

Apologies if you experienced any issues accessing the site over the last 30 minutes or so!

I was attempting to trim down a database table which has been a massive storage hog. The command being run caused a massive load on the server as it attempted to essentially truncate the table with set parameters (i.e, leave the most recent 100k records).

But, we're back. I have to fix the modlog again, but that's a small issue I really don't care about at the present time. I'll get to it eventually.

If you notice any issues, please let me know!

And as a bonus, this is how much space a single table was using (we're only on a 20GB drive right now)

Like other instances, we've just updated our instance to 0.18.2 in order to help mitigate the risks of the XSS vulnerability.

If you notice any issues, please comment below!

Cheers!

What is Threads?

If you've been living under a rock for the last few days, you mightn't have heard about Threads. Basically, Threads is another Twitter-style social media platform, heavily integrated with Instagram (Meta). From what I understand (and I'm happy to be corrected), Meta plans on integrating Threads to the ActivityPub protocol in the future. ActivityPub (colloquially known as Federation) is how services like Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc, integrate and can show posts/images from a remote instance on the local instance. In fact, it's probably how most of you are reading this (as we're a small server with less than 100 users)!

Why is Threads a threat to the Fediverse?

The way I see it, is it is similar to a company buyout. The company that's purchasing the smaller company/competitor reassures the clientele of the smaller company that "Nothing will change. We want to embrace how this company operates and make the parent company like this one!". Seems harmless, right? Wrong. I've seen it happen before with companies in Australia (and globally). It never turns out this way. It pretty much always works out for the worst, and ends up in pissed off clientele and a husk of a great company (I'm looking at you, iiNet... thanks, TPG for ruining it).

While not the same to what I believe will happen to the Fediverse should Meta/big-tech be able to Federate, it's similar. Microsoft said it best themselves (as found by the U.S. DoJ); and this is what I believe we'll end up with if we allow federation with Meta/big-tech. EEE (Embrace the technology (so, federate with the existing network), Extend the technology by developing PROPRIETARY extensions to the ActivityPub protocol (so, for example, Threads has a new feature that won't be compatible or made available with the Open Source ActivityPub protocol), and finally Extinguish the Open Source ActivityPub protocol by marginalising existing Federation hosts because the new proprietary features they've added to ActivityPub are either exorbitantly expensive for small instances (like us) to use, or by simply locking the features up as "Trade Secrets" and never releasing them to the rest of the open network, thus killing all other instances because they have the largest share of users, and it has become the de-facto platform for everyone to use.

What is the stance of Bleh.au?

We have preemptively defederated from threads.net in the event they activate the ActivityPub protocol within Threads. Mainly for the reason above, but also because it has grown ridiculously fast overnight, and I don't believe the content on there at this present time is what I want people to see when they come to my Fediverse instances.

I want to be clear; it's not JUST Threads/Meta we should be concerned about. If, for example, Apple created a social media platform and it grew this ridiculously quickly overnight, I'd defederate it, too. Similar could be said with Twitter. If they decided to jump-on-in to the Fediverse, I'd defederate it as well, simply because Musk is nuts and his mentality towards technology mostly screams Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. And I don't like the content on Twitter.

Many other instances aren't speaking up about Threads or what they plan on doing regarding Federating with them. They're staying quiet. I'm not sure why, but if a small server like us can be vocal about it, why can't they?

That's my stance on it. It's not my only issue and sole reason why I'm defederating from Threads.net, but it's the main, major reason. I'm happy to hear your thoughts on it! Let me know what you think.

• iKill101

I've gone ahead and updated the Lemmy containers to the latest version, being 0.18.1. This should hopefully fix a few issues I've noticed over the last week or so. It should also allow me to disable certain safety CRON jobs (such as auto-restarting the containers). Basically the same stuff that most other instances have been doing since 0.18.0 was released.

But, here's some metrics for this small instance. I'm going to be looking at upgrading the VPS over the next week or so due to the limited amount of RAM and limited root storage.

Currently building a landing page for all of the Fediverse Instances I'm spooling up under this domain.

Still a long way to go, but this'll be an update thread for it.