Our servers are all hosted in Finland indeed, but we use Cloudflare for DDoS protection etc. Clients/bots/scripts/etc (like FediDB) don’t see our server IP addresses directly, they see Cloudflare IP addresses. FediDB uses the IP address it sees to assume what country the server is in.

The same is true for a bunch of other Lemmy servers as well - a lot of the ones FediDB shows as “United States” are actually hosted in Europe (or elsewhere).

What I mean is that some posters have a bunch of alts on different instances, and if they get awards split between their accounts, then they’ll be at a bit of a disadvantage 😄

This is cool!

Any rules for alts? Can people “claim” alt accounts to sum up their votes?

It’s very unlikely lemm.ee will ever be a suitable host for video content. Please host your videos on other platforms, embedding them on lemm.ee posts will work just fine.

Definitely not 😄

Hey, there isn’t any default community right now. There are a few different databases that track graphs of such things, for example, fedidb.org.

Thank you very much for the support!

Our infrastructure costs are currently quite stable at around 200€ per month, and considering that the instance is right now quite decently supporting nearly 6000 monthly active users, you could say that you are indeed relatively contributing a ton - you are effectively covering server costs for 60 people!

The fact that it’s a monthly amount is particularly great, because with recurring income, we will get advanced warning if there is danger of funds starting to run low.

We had a few really huge days in 2023, but other than those, it seems like the growth so far in March is definitely outpacing our initial wave of new users in 2023.

The e-mail successfully went out from our side - please check your spam filters etc

It’s the correct error code (the client is sending a bad request - it’s an already used token), the problem is just that Lemmy UI doesn’t really display a useful error page to the user.

Can you share the exact error you are getting as well?

It seems to go through for me:

Could you upload an example image which does not work somewhere else and share it with me so I can try to reproduce the issue?

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.

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

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.

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.