Hear ye, hear ye! Gather round the lantern, settle yourselves by the fire, and let me regale you with the tale of the past month's goings-on. There have been victories, mishaps, curious discoveries, and perhaps even a little bit of chaos. Actually it was pretty much just chaos.

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Server updates

DotZip turns 3 years old on June 10th! To be more precise, Lemmy.zip turns 3 years old but we're gonna use that as our official birthday across our sites. Piefed.zip turns 1 year old just 3 days later, so it's close enough we'll use it as our birthday date :)

We'll have some birthday celebrations taking place, plus a cool little mini-site (we had these in Year 1 and Year 2 so we'll keep the tradition going, although it will be slightly different this year!

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Piefed took its turn at being the problem-instance for once, and caused some major headaches. Very unlike Piefed, which is normally the well behaved ~~child~~ instance.

A user disclosed publicly some vulnerabilities in Piefed that could be exploited, into a lemmy community without notifying the developer first of this. As this could then be used by anyone to exploit piefed instances, a number of Piefed admins including us took our Piefed instances offline until the fixes could be pushed. During this time, some further exploits were shared which indicated that the instance needed to stay offline longer, including the ability for any account to ban any other account without authentication. As this could be used to target vulnerable users, we held Piefed.zip offline a bit longer until these fixes were pushed too.

Thankfully all fixes were pushed in about 24 hours, and the site is back up, but it does show the impact on instances when disclosures are made improperly. The vulnerabilities were also all discovered by having an LLM scan the codebase, which probably indicates where we're at as a society right now, and that anyone developing code probably needs to do this to make sure someone doesn't beat them to it.

Thankfully it doesn't appear any real damage was done!

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After last month's Lemmy drama with nested comments, Lemmy.zip has taken its turn being well behaved and I don't have too much to say here. The Lemmy 1.0 beta is out and in testing, so hopefully not too long before we're able to upgrade and get all the cool new features.

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Please Don’t Be a Lurker!

If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip isn’t money, praise, or a signed copy of your self-published autobiography.. maybe. Its participation.

Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or feed all my posts to an LLM and see how long it would take people to realise I've been replaced by a machine. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession. (We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)

The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.

So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:

Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.

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Donations

Want to support us? We have a range of donation options to suit you!

Liberpay (Card, Paypal)

Liberpay is our newest donation method. You can donate with Paypal or with a card. The link is https://liberapay.com/dotzip

OpenCollective (Card)

Our classic donation option, but only supports card payments. The link is https://opencollective.com/lemmyzip

If you're enjoying Lemmy.zip or Piefed.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the sites and keeping the virtual lights on.

Ko-Fi (Card, Paypal)

We also have our Ko-Fi page if you'd rather use this site, which also supports Paypal and Card payments.

Thank you!

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can't express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!

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Graphs

Piefed.zip

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Lemmy.zip

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And that's it for another month.

Remember, DotZip's birthday is on the 10th June (only 10 days from today!) so do keep an eye out for the celebrations. You can usually win some games or giftcards or something if I'm feeling generous :)

Speak soon!

Demigodrick