Fediverse.cc (Meta)

Hello users - are there still any of you out there?

I’ve been contemplating replacing this Lemmy instance with one of Piefed instead, due to the asinine maintenance burden associated with keeping the Lemmy instance running and up to date, along with the generally more advanced feature set of Piefed, particularly in the moderation and federation department.

Does anyone have an opinion or strong feeling one way or the other?

Migration is probably not possible, ergo one would need to sign up again and re subscribe to their communities.

It was brought to my attention by the staff of another instance that there has been a case of illegal images being posted on another Lemmy instance. Unfortunately, due to the way Lemmy works, this means it's highly likely that this content was copied (at least in thumbnail form) across the Lemmyverse. This means there is a serious risk that this content now exists on all Lemmy instances.

I want to reiterate that nobody on Federate.cc was involved in any illegal activity, but as Lemmy is designed to broadcast content across the web to all the other Lemmy instances, we were likely affected through no fault of our own.

Lemmy currently has no effective admin UI for auditing posts or removing their associated image content, and I was unable to track any specific offending content down in our object store - given it's got 51GB of images with random UUID filenames. Although the other instances' admins are aware of only a few such offending files, the reality is that nobody seems to actually know how prevalent the problem was, thus even if I did manage to track down the particular handful of offending links, I can't be sure that we got it all.

So unfortunately, out of an abundance of caution, and given the legal jeopardy this poses, I am forced to take the most drastic possible action, which is to blow away the entire image store. Consider this a complete core ejection - all the thumbnails on this instance will shortly be gone, likely your avatars along with them. You can go ahead and re-upload an avatar and you should be good.

Going forward, posts made after today will again receive thumbnails. Any posts from before this one won't have thumbnails any more, but if you click into them, ought to still have their actual image content, as 99.9% of these are hosted elsewhere on other Lemmy instances anyway.

I'm sorry for the inconvenience caused, but the alleged nature of the images is so bad as to be too great a risk. To protect both our userbase and myself as the server operator, I have no choice but to blow it all away.

Thanks for your understanding

-s

I’ll be pulling the server offline for a few hours on Thursday the 2nd for a database migration and an update of Lemmy to 0.19.8. Unfortunately the upgrade paths are always very fragile as the Ansible situation for Lemmy is not great. I expect this will only take a few hours, but historically these updates have gotten a bit spicy. So don’t be surprised if we’re down for part of the day. That said, Lemmy is designed to catch up, so you won’t miss any content.

If I navigate to https://lemmy.federate.cc/c/politics@lemmy.world for example the most recent post is 12 days old.

Looking at that community on lemmy.world there's heaps of posts.

I was invited to sign up this morning.

I attempted to do so. When I try to sign in I see an "unverified email" toast error. I haven't received an email asking me to verify.

Sup lemmings!

As you probably noticed, this instance was dead for the majority of last week. Sorry about that. An update to the latest version using the official method was less than successful, and the documentation less than informative.

At any rate, the site is back up now, though I’d expect slowdowns over the next day or so as all that backlog from the fediverse filters in.

Sorry about that!

Currently 👀 an upstream issue that’s preventing non-Lemmy instances from federating with us; this is preventing interacting with Kbin among other things. Hoping this will get merged in soon, otherwise I’ll probably have to monkey-patch our instance to get this working. Kbin has a large user base and so the ability for us to subscribe and participate in their communities (“magazines” in their parlance) is important to me.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3354

It’s a free progressive web app; visit https://wefwef.app/ in Safari, go to the action/share sheet and click Add To Home Screen. You’ll find it’s a near carbon copy of Apollo was on iOS. To use it with your account here, just go to Login and where it asks you which server, scroll down to select Other and use “lemmy.federate.cc” as the server. Voila!

Don’t forget to browse by “Subscribed” or “All” instead of “Local”. If you want to search for or subscribe to a remote community, you can search either for the full URL of the remote community inside our search box, or search with the syntax !community@server.com

I've set up email at the federate.cc domain today, backed by Migadu, a lightweight privacy-focused email service out of Switzerland.

If any members would like an e-mail at this domain, either send me an email (sparky@), or DM me here on Lemmy. They're not created automatically by default, as I have to manually go do something adminny to make them happen.

But upon request, an email @federate.cc is open to anyone who wants one.

Some caveats:

• This isn't Gmail, we're poor. Assume you have something like 500mb-1gb of storage in your account. Not a good place for large attachments, etc.
• You're subject to the same code of conduct as our instances, e.g., if you start sending spam or harassment, you'll get shut down.

Federate.cc is live with our first Fediverse service, Lemmy! While I'm the sole user on this instance for the moment, I hope to eventually attract a small community to join me here.

Copy/pasting from the main website:

federate.cc is a collection of fediverse services operated on behalf of its members with limited commercial interest

we are funded entirely through membership dues

there is no advertising, data selling, or any such corporate baloney here

we host instances of popular distributed, federated software platforms, providing a carefully-tended "home instance" / "homeserver" across several major platforms

we intend for our services to be a home for upstanding netizens, interested in participating respectfully and in good faith across the fediverse

in general, everyone is welcome, though we reserve the right to refuse membership to anyone suspected of prior misbehaviour across the fediverse

we want to encourage quality over quantity and prefer a small, tight-knit community of active contributors; there is no aspiration to become a large public instance