Hello all,

10th June 2025 marks Lemmy.zip's second birthday!

Following the whole Reddit API fiasco in 2023, many of us moved over to Lemmy, and have never looked back. I remember sitting at my desk (it was a Sunday morning, it was probably raining, it was roughly 10am and I was actually supposed to be somewhere else) and buying the domain, wondering how on earth I was actually going to get a real website working.

It has taken a LOT of learning and perseverance, but since then we've created a fantastic community full over people from all over the world, and Lemmy.zip continues to grow and develop.

As I said in last year's birthday post, running a Lemmy instance has it's ups and downs - some days nothing goes wrong and for a large period of this last 12 months we've had a really stable site, which has led to me even at times referring to things as "too quiet". Oh how I miss those days 😭

But even with all the struggles over the last few months (spam, server issues, lemm.ee's closure) - I have been humbled by all the support and well wishes from users across the fediverse.

This year we've grown to over 4000 registered users, doubled the admin team, and learned loads along the way.

I've highlighted some of this year's happenings in our Year Two microsite: yeartwo.lemmy.zip. (PS - if you're on mobile, you can rotate your device to read it easier!)

You can also see the Year One microsite here if you're curious.

Looking forward in to year 3, I am hoping that Lemmy.zip can continue to thrive, and can become a home for anyone in the fediverse. It's sad to see instances closing, but I am hopeful we can provide a refuge and a space that in time, others can also call home.

None of this is of course possible without YOU. Yes you, reading this.

To the mods, thank you for doing a fantastic job of moderating your communities. There are a wide range of voices that contribute to Lemmy.zip, and your abilities to manage this fairly and consistently are what makes so many communities a success.

To those who have donated, you really are the backbone of keeping Lemmy.zip alive. Each donation means so much to us, and gives us hope that this is a project that many believe in and want to support.

And importantly, to the Lemmy.zip users - I know I always say this, but you make this whole site worthwhile. And I really mean it. Even if you are a lurker, just being a part of this actually means so much to us.

Happy Birthday Lemmy.zip 🍻

Hello all!

To celebrate Lemmy.zip turning 2 years old, we are once again hosting a small giveaway to say thank you for being here ❤️

We're giving away 3 prizes to 3 lucky winners. This will be 1 x £25 Steam gifts, and 2 x £10 Steam gifts.

The giveaway will be open for 48 hours from 12:00 UTC on the 10th June 2025, to 12:00 UTC on the 12th June

You can enter by making a comment in this very thread! Your comment can say or be absolutely anything you want (within reason!)

Once you've made a comment, you should get a message back from ZippyBot confirming you've entered and a ticket number. For transparency, at the end of this we'll publish the entry list and ticket numbers.

You must be a Lemmy.zip user to enter (comments from anyone else will be ignored!) and you will need a Steam account and be happy to send me your username so I can gift you the value via Steam. Your Lemmy.zip account must have been created before the 9th June 2025.

At the end of the giveaway, I'll lock the thread and Zippy will pull three random entries. The first username pulled will win the first prize (£25), and the other two users will win the other prizes (£10).

I've put a few FAQs in this spoiler tag if you want to know more:

FAQs - PLEASE READ!

Hello to all of our new users.

I wish we could all meet in better circumstances. The closing of lemm.ee is a real blow to the fediverse, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for the lemm.ee admin team. Lemm.ee was a cornerstone of the lemmy community, and set a high bar for moderation and technical performance.

Finding a home on the fediverse can be tough. Whether you're here to lurk, post, moderate, or contribute in your own way, we’re glad you’ve joined us. Lemmy.zip might not replace what was lost, but we hope it can become a lemmy instance where you can feel at home.

Everyone should receive a welcome PM when they sign up to Lemmy.zip from the ~~ever-present dark lord overseer~~ friendly bot, ZippyBot. However, in case poor Zippy has been overworked and forgotten to send the PM to you, here's some helpful information regarding Lemmy.zip!

• All of our policies can be found at legal.lemmy.zip. This includes our Code of Conduct. Please (please!) have a read of this. Our number 1 rule is Remember the human! (no harassment, threats, etc.). We absolutely adhere to this. Treat people with respect.

• When you created your account, we set up some "Default Blocks". If you want a more unfiltered Lemmy experience, you can head to your account settings and remove the blocks. You can read more about this in our Welcome Post - they are currently hexbear and lemmgrad.

• We have monthly updates! You can read the latest one here!. We're always open to suggestions if there's anything else you'd like to see in these.

• We have some metrics around federation for the curious among you. The link is in the sidebar or you can click here!

• We have our status page at status.lemmy.zip. In the unlikely event the server becomes sentient and starts a robot uprising, full details will be available here.

Finally, your admin team is myself (Demigodrick), Sami, Druid, and Gazby. Please reach out to any of us if you feel you need help or support with anything. We also have a support email - hello@lemmy.zip.

If you have any questions, please let us know and we'll do our best to answer them.

Thanks,

The Lemmy.zip Admin Team

Hello all!

Firstly, apologies I missed last month's update. As I will go in to during this month's update, the train has not been smooth sailing, the ship missed the station - for a little while, trying to uncover what has gone wrong has been like unraveling a can of worms that has gone off the tracks.

Because of the length of this update, I'm leaving off new communities for this month, but feel free to pop any in the comments you'd like to share!

Server Updates

So, I'll begin at the 0.19.11 update for Lemmy. I'd planned in some time for the update, and to begin with things went fairly normally, with usual server updates etc. Then it came time to update Lemmy itself to 0.19.11 - however, instead of the ~10 minutes of suggested downtime, it quickly became apparent that something wasn't quite right. The logs gave no indication of anything happening, and after an hour it became apparent that something hadn't worked. With not much to go on, and all the various logs showing that absolutely nothing had apparently happened, I cancelled the upgrade process and tweaked the logs so I'd get a bit more information than the standard logs usually show. This turned out to be an internal DNS issue, where Lemmy wasn't talking to the database.

So, onwards again I fixed that issue and reapplied the update, to which it had appeared to start working. Excitedly, I give it ten minutes as advised, to come back and see that it was still going.. and going.. and going.. and two hours later it was saying something was still happening. Well, by this point I'd run out of time and trusted in the process that it would resolve itself. I had unfortunately had to go to sleep as I had work the next morning, and a baby to look after.

By the next morning, still nothing. However, I can't SSH in to the server on my phone (nor would I ever want to in case it was stolen etc) and all the backend stuff is behind layers of protection, so the site was down for the day while I had to do real world work nonsense.

By the time I'd got home, it still thought it was ongoing, so I made the decision that likely something was broken and cancelled the update. Of course, letting something go to town for hours on the database meant it was probably ruined, or would require completely investigating - ain't nobody got time for that. So I crossed my fingers and hoped my backup solution had worked which it did with flying colours. I restored the database and the site came back to life.

Of course, I don't like running old versions, so I rescheduled which went much much smoother the second time around, taking 8 minutes. Whew.

For a few days, everything looked great. Metrics looked spot on and the site was running like it always was, and then bam - the server completely locked up:

A restart did eventually fix this, and things returned to normal, but not quite the same.

On the 24th April, I started getting reports of the site returning various 502 and 504 errors, and also issues with images loading. Broken images has been a feature of the image proxy for a while, but this was on another scale, with sometimes whole pages of broken images and a connection timeout on every refresh. I was, in hindsight, very out of my depth here.

I started trying to see what the cause of the timeouts where, and it became apparent quickly that the site was being hit by previously-unseen levels of traffic:

On the above graph, the left hand side was the usual amount of traffic we'd get, and on the right was the new levels we were receiving. This was likely causing the server to effectively be DDOS'd, and uncovering issues with the performance of the server. For a comparison of the usual amount of traffic we get, here's a graph from the last server update:

Many configs were tweaked. Much database performance monitoring took place. Things were turned off and back on indiscriminately. Unfortunately not much worked.

It was at this point our new Admin, Gazby, joined the team - and quickly got to work diagnosing and fixing so many of the issues.

Some of the changes include much better backups, reduced latency in image storage (the images moved from the USA to EU storage), images being served from i.lemmy.zip to allow for better caching to reduce the load on the server, complete review and tweak of all the configs and server setup, and a detailed list of things we need to work on going forwards (plus no doubt lots of things I am forgetting).

This has really helped to stabilize the site, and while we can see it's not 100% perfect, the amount of 502/504 errors should have massively reduced, and the site should be almost as it used to be.

One of things Gazby has also worked on is reporting and insights into the server, and so for example here's a graph showing the 504 errors today:

We've got some plans on the horizon we're working on which should increase the performance of the site, which possibly/probably will include a server move to rule out hardware issues or latent config issues we can't find.

Whatever triggered these issues I am still not sure - it looks like it could be scrapers/AI bots hammering the site, and so we've put some measures in place here. If you use the old front end then you may have noticed a cloudflare challenge to try and prevent the server being overloaded - also a prewarning, the old front end is no longer maintained, and unless someone steps in, it is not compatible with the next version of Lemmy. Therefore at that point it will be retired unless someone works on it to bring it back in line. It is also the cause of a LOT of the server traffic problems, so it probably isn't too much of a bad thing. Maybe someone will rewrite it to be better :)

As it stands, things still aren't perfect - we had an issue where the bit of the server that actually directs you to the right place got overwhelmed, and so we put a fix in for that, but they are hopefully a lot better than they were a couple of months ago.

Donations

Lemmy.zip only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50) and is mostly funded by the community!

We keep all the details around donations on our OpenCollective page, with full transparency around income and expenditure.

If you're enjoying Lemmy.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 site and keeping the virtual lights on.

We've also put up a link to our Ko-Fi page where you can donate via paypal instead of using a card. All Ko-Fi donations will be totalled up and added to OpenCollective each month for transparency. I've added a link in the sidebar, but you can also click the image below to go there:

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!

Please remember, traditional social media is only "free" to you because they sell your data. We don't do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.

Graphs

I know you've come for the shiny pictures, so here you go!

CPU over last 30 days:

RAM over last 30 days:

Disk space used:

Here's a few new ones for you! Lemmy DB size:

Images database size:

Here's our current actual images stored:

Here's the cloudflare overview:

Here's requests:

Bandwidth:

And here is visitors:

And finally, traffic by country (mostly federation traffic remember!)

So hopefully that fills everyone in on where we're up to, and what we're working on, but if you have any questions please ask away below!

One final thing - on the 10th June, Lemmy.zip turns two years old!! 🥳 🎉 I'm hoping to do something nice for it, similar to last years (which is here if you haven't seen it!) - but a quick thank you to everyone who has been part of the ride so far!

Thanks

Demigodrick

Just wanted to post a quick confirmation that the site has updated to 0.19.11.

I'll be keeping an eye on the site over the next hour or so, but if you notice anything wrong please let me know.

Thanks Demigodrick

Hi All,

As some of you may have realised, the planned upgrade sort of crashed everything, and we had our longest period of downtime since the site began.

This is partly because I had to go to sleep (thanks to a newborn and a job).

The good news is that the backup process worked! We've restored to seconds before the upgrade took the site offline.

The bad news is that federation is likely to be.. wonky.. for a little while. The site may also go up and down while I undo some of the fixes I tried.

Ultimately the issue came down to the upgrade failing (I am not sure why - will be digging into this now the priority is no longer getting the site up) and then the containers not talking to eachother, so the UI wouldn't talk to lemmy, and lemmy wouldn't talk to the database.

I rebuilt the containers, restored the backup, restarted everything, and it's all come back up (admittedly not perfect right now).

Importantly, I want to issue an apology. This isn't what I want for Lemmy.zip, and it should've been handled way better by myself. I'm always learning but this took way longer than it should've, and while I take some solace in the fact the backup process worked and has been proven to work in production, the delay in being able to get this back up is entirely my fault and frankly unacceptable.

I'll be working to document this outage, the steps it took to get it back up, and some form of repeatable plan so a repair can be replicated in the future if I'm not available.

In terms of upgrading to 0.19.11 - I will have to try again soon as it's got some security fixes we desperately need to implement.

Thanks

Demigodrick

Hi All,

Some sad news, but it has become apparent in order to safeguard the longevity of this site, there are no options left other than to cease allowing people from the United Kingdom to access Lemmy.zip.

Just to reassure everyone else right at the start - this ONLY affects users from the UK accessing Lemmy.zip. There is no effect on everyone else, and nothing in your Lemmy experience will change.

Due to the implementation of the Online Safety Act, we will be restricting access to Lemmy.zip to UK users starting 15th February 2025 —one week from today.

Why is this happening?

Lemmy.zip is hosted in Finland, and we have always strived to operate with respect for privacy and in line with all applicable laws. However, the UK’s Online Safety Act presents significant legal and operational challenges for small, independent fediverse sites, just like this one. The Act’s vague and overbearing requirements, combined with the potential for disproportionate and extreme fines, force us to make this decision to protect both the site and its users.

This law impacts a wide range of content with vague or conflicting definitions, and as a volunteer-run site, we cannot ensure full compliance. We do not wish to compromise your privacy or force you to verify your identity through intrusive age checks, which is the only method allowed under the Act. Therefore, we have no choice but to block access from the UK.

This won't impact on federation, nor accessing the communities from an instance that tries to comply with (or ignores) the Act. Obviously if you're from any other country in the world that isn't the UK, this won't apply to you at all.

If this affects you, then you are able to export your data (subscriptions etc) from your profile settings, and import them on to another instance (Feddit.uk is a good shout for brits!)

Unfortunately this is also brought about by my personal circumstances as the site owner - I'm not in a position to just ignore the Act like many are. Complying with the act would mean we would either have to implement Age Verification for all users to access the site, or we would have to disable NSFW entirely, which means communities that use NSFW tags for spoilers or content warnings also wouldn't be accessible.

For those curious, UK users will instead be directed to this page when they try access the site.

This has been a really hard decision to make, and I fear many more fediverse sites that are somehow linked to the UK will need to take this step in order to protect themselves.

If this is overturned by the courts in the UK, then the block will be removed as soon as possible. I have my fingers crossed.

Happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Demigodrick.

Hey all,

Today, 10th June 2024, marks Lemmy.zip's first birthday.

Back on the 10th June 2023, I was as disillusioned with Reddit as many others here were, and wanted somewhere I could go where mods and users weren't treated like an end product.

At the time I had been messing with a lot of home server stuff (think Jellyfin and the *arr suite - usenet is great 😉) and figured I could spin up a docker container or two, how hard could it be right?

I'd never even heard of ansible, never changed an nginx config file, hell I'd never had more than one other person use something I'd spun up before. But after a couple of hours, there it was - Lemmy.zip. And suddenly, people were actually joining, posting, and making content. It felt unreal.

Since then, and with an awful lot of help and support from Sami and the community, I feel like we've got a really good, solid, stable and active Lemmy instance, our own corner of the internet where we can't be abused for corporate greed. In this first year, I have spent an awful lot of time learning how to run a so-called "social media" site, how to protect the backend, and how to build a bot to do all the boring stuff.

Linked in this post is a very brief overview of the last year - yearone.lemmy.zip - which gives some detail on how things unfolded at the start.

I am insanely thankful for all the lemmy.zip users, even the ones who only visited briefly. You're all brilliant (yes, even the lurkers 😘 ) and I hope you all continue to enjoy Lemmy.zip for many more years.

Running your own Lemmy server has its ups and downs. Days like today, when I can debug various issues without stressing, push new code to ZippyBot like its second nature, and have the ability to celebrate massive milestones like this, make all the bad times worth it.

I remember about a month or two in to the sites operation, and we'd just upgraded to the latest lemmy version - there was a period of about 5 or 6 hours continuous downtime and nothing I tried was getting the site working again. I was sat with my head in my hands, completely out of ideas, ready to give up. But thanks to the guidance of some fantastic people in the wider Lemmy community, eventually the site came back to life. Many mistakes have been made (many server backups have been restored 🙃) but we've continued to learn and grow, and I think the site is all the better for it.

We've got over 2,500 signed up users, we've recently tipped over 500 active users a month, we're in the top 20 lemmy instances - and in reality, that's all thanks to the mods and users of lemmy.zip. Without you, there wouldn't be any point to the site!

(Interesting fact - our longest serving user is Firestorm Druid - I don't have any medals yet sorry, but you deserve one!)

Looking forward to the next 12 months, I'm hoping we can continue to grow and continue to be a Lemmy instance for everyone. With the increasing enshittification of Reddit (and the wider "traditional" social media sites), I hope many people can escape and make their way over here. The Lemmy of today is a much different place to what it was 12 months ago. Even from purely a technical standpoint, federation is infinitely more reliable, and there are many long-standing servers to choose from now.

So once again I say a massive thank you to everyone. To the mods, you're the backbone of creating content across the whole lemmy network. Its often a thankless job, but here's hoping this goes a little way to expressing the gratitude we all have for you.

To everyone that has donated - I'm still humbled by your generosity. Thank you, you keep the lights on and the bits flowing.

And to the users of Lemmy.zip - thank you for being here. You make this whole thing worthwhile :)

Happy Birthday Lemmy.zip 🍻

Demigodrick ❤️