Lemmy talk

Heads up: you might see a quick "are you a bot?" page on lemmy.radio now

You may notice a short page that says "Making sure you're not a bot!" (with a little jackal) when you first visit lemmy.radio. It only lasts about a second, then you're in. Here's why it's there.

The problem: lemmy.radio has been getting swamped by AI scraper bots: automated programs pretending to be real people, loading old posts thousands of times a second to harvest data. It was overloading the site and causing the errors and slowness a lot of you have seen lately.

The fix: I added a free, open-source tool called Anubis that acts like a bouncer at the door. When you arrive, it gives your browser a tiny puzzle to solve... think of it like rolling dice until you hit the right number. Your computer does it automatically in about a second, and then it remembers you for about a week so you won't see it again for a while.

It's easy for a real visitor but a nightmare for the bots: they'd have to solve that puzzle millions of times over, which is too slow and expensive to bother with. So real people get in, and the bots get turned away.

What you need to know:

• You might see the page on your first visit (or about once a week). Totally normal, just let it finish.
• Keep JavaScript on for it to work.
• Apps and other Lemmy servers aren't affected, this only checks web browsers.

Sorry for the recent hiccups. Things should be much smoother now. Maybe even faster!

As always, please let me know if this causes any issues...

73,

w0odl

My local club is hosting a field day event and I'm going for the first time in a few years. I got into ham radio specifically to meet people, but transportation can be hard, so I often can't attend things like hamfests or club meetings.

I might try making some CW contacts.

We turned 3 today and I have renewed the lemmy.radio domain for another year!

3 years ago, during the great reddit api/mobile move that a lot of people made, I thought it would be nice to have an instance just for hams. And now here we are! I've learned so much from the posts here and really enjoy being a part of this instance and maintaining it.

I greatly appreciate all of the people who share their radio knowledge here. I hope you continue to enjoy our special little instance.

73,

w0odl

And of course, if you'd like to celebrate our instances birthday and help keep this place alive: we have a Liberapay setup to help with donations.

https://liberapay.com/lemmyradio/

This little instance has been great, but Lemmy and the fediverse in general is really dragging on me.

Every. Single. Thread. has the word "capitalism" or "Trump" in it somewhere. I'm sick to death of it. Even though I agree with a lot of the sentiment, the erosion of the middle class, the concentration of wealth, the consolidation of media, the "you will own nothing and be happy" mentality permeating the consumer space. In many ways that's why I left Reddit and joined Lemmy, but dang it that doesn't mean I want to talk about absolutely nothing else.

And the only communities devoid of politics are also devoid of content. I do a lot of worldbuilding stuff, and I've tried to make !worldbuilding@lemmy.world more active, but sometimes I feel like I'm the only poster. Then I look at r/worldbuilding, and there's a glut of really interesting posts showcasing people's imagination and creativity, and nary a mention of Musk or Epstein in sight.

And then there's the tech side of things. Hope you like Linux, cuz that's all you're going to see. And if you dare suggest that Linux may not be the right choice for your blind grandmother, you get eviscerated in the comments.

Granted, Reddit itself used to have a similar problem. It attracted a very specific type of user (neckbeards) and the experience wasn't great if you weren't one, but ironically the same popularization of Reddit that lead to its platform decay also solved this homogeneity problem. Similarly, Tankies and their ilk seem to flock to Lemmy, explaining the tone of the discourse.

Am I crazy? Anyone else feel the same? Did I knock over a hornet's nest and this post is going to end up deleted?

(continued from https://lemmy.radio/post/12771575)

Hey all!

From a previous thread/discussion, I have set up a contribution location for anyone wishing to help with costs for this instance.

This is not mandatory or required!

People have reached out to me to say that they enjoy using our lemmy instance and wanted to help, and I'm very thankful for that!

We will be using Liberapay for this and our profile for contributions is:

https://liberapay.com/lemmyradio/

This link and badge can also be found in the sidebar.

Below is a breakdown for how you will be helping with your contributions!

Monthly

• Hosting/VPS - $72
• Email - $17.45
• Object storage (media) - ~ $12*

Yearly

• .radio domain - € 25**

Please let me know how Liberapay is and as always, let me know if you have any questions! I will keep this highlighted on our instance for a week.

* media storage will fluctuate as we use the instance more, but I try to clean up old data/media frequently.

** .radio domains is about to be transferred to a new registrar, sav.com. They have not commented on if pricing will remain the same.

I've had it fixed in my head that covering hosting costs is just my job as admin, and I've been fine with that. But I've been rethinking it lately.

If someone wants to contribute to keeping this place running, who am I to say no? Feels a little rude to cut people out of something they actually want to be part of. lemmy.radio is a community, not my personal project I'm sharing.

I'm looking at Open Collective as a way to do this transparently. You'd be able to see exactly what the instance costs and where any contributions go, but I'd love to hear about other options.

Nothing's set up yet. Wanted to float it here first and hear what you think. Open to other suggestions too.

FYI I've done this so far: https://opencollective.com/lemmyradio

73,

Ben w0odl

(I'm keeping this post open and highlighted for a week, ending 4/18. thank you for your input!)

Edit 4/14:

I received this response back from OpenCollective:

Hi, thanks for your application. We're going to have to review applications like this in light of the legislation passed in the UK (The Online Safety Act) March 2025.

In light of this, I think I will also look into https://liberapay.com/

lemmy.radio will be down for up to an hour starting at 00:00 UTC 03/26/2026

This is needed for server maintenance. I'll post here again when we are up and discuss the updates!

~ w0odl

post-downtime notes:

Thanks for putting up with the (un)scheduled downtime!

A status update: for the past 2 years, we have operated using a fairly large size VPS using Akamai/Linode. To be specific, we were using:

• 16GB ram
• 8 CPUs
• 320GB drive

This was mostly due to the the large amounts of images, videos, media that we accumulate over the years we've been up and running (we're going to be turning 3 years old very soon btw!)

A few months ago, to help with the large costs of running this site, I moved all of our media to object storage, which TREMENDOUSLY cut down our drive space usage. And...

Today is the day, I actually scaled us back to a "smaller" VPS to help cut down on prices further. We are currently using:

• 8GB ram
• 4 CPUs
• 160GB drive

So let's talk turkey about savings (if you care)

This drops our server fees from about ~$175/month to around ~$90/month

This is the price of the VPS, object storage, .radio domain, and email services we use.

Thank you for putting up with the hour or so we were down. I'm hoping that this will keep us running WELL into the future.

Cheers and 73,

w0odl

CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Team, which is a program that trains volunteers in basic disaster response skills to assist their communities during emergencies.

Ham radio operators are really useful to CERT and at least in the community I joined with my local city they really recommend to get into ham radio, so from my perspective of what I've learned locally is they go hand in hand.

I know this server rules say communities should be amateur radio related and I think it goes pretty well together, but would also like general CERT discussion for example what people keep in their CERT backpack and what events they have participated in etc beyond just the radio aspect of it. I feel the CERT community would fit nicely on lemmy.radio

https://www.arrl.org/emergency-communications-field-instruction

Hey all!

This is actually a double upgrade from 0.9.13 -> 0.9.14 -> 0.9.15. This mostly includes moderation feature add. Give them a look at: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-12-24_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.15_and_Testing_for_1.0

Let me know if any issues arise from the upgrade. Seems like lemmy 1.0 is around the corner!

73,

w0odl

It would be useful if all radio topics could be hosted and discussed on a dedicated fedi instance. The lemmy.radio description is constrained to amateur radio:

“A lemmy instance for amateur radio enthusiasts and communities.”

There are no communities anywhere in the fedi for FM or AM radio apart from !radio on LW (a Cloudflare-centralised instance). And that community is strangely constrained (tech support/user inquiries unwelcome according to the sidebar). DAB radio has one community strangely placed on a “UK centric” instance: !dabradio@feddit.uk.

Hey all!

Just wanted to share that we were down for about 2.5 hours today due to space issues on our server. I moved a few things around and everything seems to be up and running.

To help with this issue, I've moved our image server to S3 which may alleviate some of our issues, but I think the largest chuck of space is being taken up by propagated comments from other servers and I'm not sure what to do about that. We're currently using about 300gigs out of a 320gig VPS.

It seems the S3 image uploads are working, but as always, if something seems off, let me know!

73,

w0odl

update 04:49UTC Oct/09/25: Currently migrating all of our image data to S3 so we don't have any more broken photos

update 06:26UTC Oct/09/25: Image migration to S3 complete. Let me know if any issues arise or something seems off!

This version fixes a handful of bugs. Most importantly it prevents a background task from blocking the Lemmy server entirely. Edit marks on comments are now hidden if it was edited within 5 minutes of creation. Also the browser cache usage is significantly reduced. Additionally ARM builds are fixed by using the default memory allocator on that platform.

Please check the release notes for other updates and of course, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

We turned 2 today and I have renewed the lemmy.radio domain for another year! We've come along way since the great reddit migration. We still see a lot of new users apply weekly.

Some stats!

• 296 Users
• 463 Posts
• 3.68k Comments

I've really enjoyed hosting this service, learning new things, and getting to know everyone.

Thanks for making this place amazing.

73,

w0odl

Check the release notes for all the updates available!

Please let me know if any issues arise,

~w0odl

Lots of great changes on the frontend and backend. Please give the release notes a read.

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

Includes an optional Developer AMA in link provided.

Updates include:

• Fix Youtube thumbnails by increasing the metadata fetch limit to 1 MB #5266
• Also remove private messages when banning user with “remove content” (goodbye Nicole) #5414
• Ignore accept-language header if no site languages are specified, to avoid that users have English disabled and can’t see most posts #5485
• Enable english for users on instances with all languages enabled, to resolve the above problem #5489 #5493
• Only list local banned users under /admin #5364
• Add crawl-delay to robots.txt #3009
• Optimize migrations which were included in 0.19.6 #5301

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

OK, so I'm just thinking out loud here. Lemmy is meant to be a federated alternative to Reddit. As such, it uses Reddit's discussion format (threaded comments, voting, etc) as well as the notion of subreddits (here called communities).

But because it's federated, anyone can create an instance with the right skills and resources. These instances are naturally going to range in specificity. Some are broad in scope while others, like this one, focus on a specific topic.

What I'm curious about is how communities are handled within more narrowly focused instances. From what I've seen from the subreddits I frequented that have jumped to Lemmy, it would seem that an instance is now the equivalent to a subreddit, with Lemmy's equivalent communities being more like sub-subreddits.

Thinking in terms of old-school message boards, an instance is a forum, and communities are subforums. The key difference is that anyone can create a subforum.

I'm curious how this will affect the culture of Lemmy as a whole, how it affects moderation, etc.

Again, I'm just thinking out loud.

Hey everyone!

Just a couple of updates and changes. I have updates the sidebar rules with 5. Community creation should be amateur radio related just to make sure we keep the spirit of this instance grounded in amateur radio.

I have also removed the #lemmy-radio IRC channel from the sidebar. We still have help and discussion chats here in !lemmy@lemmy.radio and on matrix, #lemmy-radio:matrix.org . Also, please be sure to follow on Mastodon: mstdn.social/@lemmyradio.

Thanks and 73,

w0odl

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

~~I will be performing server mainenance followed by a lemmy upgrade Friday, 12/13/2024 @ 08:00 CST~~

Server upgrade was to update us from Ubuntu 23.04 to 24.04. This was needed as 23.04 is no longer supported.

Updates in lemmy 0.19.8 can be found at https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-12-12_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.8

Mostly pictrs updates

The ubuntu upgrade was a big to do but seems to have gone well. As always, please let me know if any other update issues pop up.

73,

w0odl

I'll be making a few support/help updates this weekend and wanted to share them.

• status.lemmy.radio
• Matrix - #lemmy-radio:matrix.org
• IRC - #lemmy-radio @ irc.libera.chat
• Mastodon - mstdn.social/@lemmyradio

These links have been added in the sidebar in the Help section.

73,

~w0odl

Mostly small bug fixes

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-11-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.7

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

This was a BIG one... and a lot of "fun". Click on the version numbers for release information.

0.19.4

This was a major upgrade from lemmy 0.19.3 to 0.19.4 which upgraded postgres to 16. This also gives us federation to a few new 3rd party applications like Wordpress and also lets us have local only communities.

0.19.5

Mostly bug fixes.

0.19.6

A lot of changes all over the place. Faster federation, lemmy-ui updates. Please checkout the release notes to see what new functionality we have!

As always, please let me know if any issues pop up. This was a MASSIVE update.

73,

w0odl

Had a few issues upgrading the Postgres database and pictrs. The instance ran out of disk space during the upgrades and it took the site down for about 3 hours while I migrated us to a new server instance. We're now hosted on:

• 16GB of ram
• 8 CPU cores
• 320GB of storage

... but we are still on Lemmy 0.19.3.

I'll attempt a new update soon, and hopefully with the new update, move our images over to an AWS/Linode bucket because we seem to double in space every 3 months and it's getting expensive.

73,

w0odl

This major update mostly fixes how pictrs, the local image hosting service, saves its data.

As always, let me know if any issues arise. I don't think this will help with any federation issues we have been seeing. But now that we are on the latest and greatest patch, we can rule out versions being our issue for now.

73,

Ben w0odl