literature.cafe meta

Welcome to the homegrown artisan Midwestern cloud. We have successfully migrated! Except for lingering image issues because pictrs and wasabi are not behaving... I except to get those ironed out today. Please bear with me as I hit them with a hammer until I'm happy.

Hey all!

As you may know, prices for server components are increasing across the board to astronomical prices. We currently host lit cafe on Hetzner, as do a lot of our peers. They recently announced significant price increases across the board for servers with components that they have already purchased... which leaves a bad taste in my mouth. On top of that, the prices are becoming unreasonable for simple VPS hosting situations at Hetzner. Because of that and some other reasons, we will be migrating lit cafe to a new provider. We are currently paying for a ccx23 for the main server and a ccx13 for the alternative frontends. We expect a 30% increase in our bill with these changes.

The new provider is https://nulled.llc/services/kuhaku a smaller provider located in the Midwest, USA. On top of the significant prices savings, we will be supporting a small business with homegrown artisan Midwestern cloud vibes. We appreciate the support we've received so far and expect similar performance with the ability to consolidate our server footprint back to a single VPS. We are expecting to begin the migration tomorrow ( Thursday, March 19th 3pm EDT) and hopefully will be done in a reasonable manner. Longest thing will be backing up and restoring the database of course.

Thank you for understanding!

TL;DR lit cafe is migrating, there will be scheduled downtime tomorrow to move.

Hello!

As you might already know or have seen if you browse the local feed of our instance, we are going to be putting into effect some tighter rules around what sort of communities will be allowed on this instance. Mostly just saying this is a literature focused instance so we want literature focused communities on here. I've reached out to all of the moderators of the communities that will be disallowed going forward and they have graciously agreed to start their migration. I do want to say we appreciate whole-heartily how understanding everyone has been with this change. This is going to be a rolling change, I don't except compliance immediately to all who are affected. I have updated the rules in the sidebar, but we will work with a rolling schedule to allow for migrations.

8. Please keep instance-hosted communities related to literature and literature topics.

This is the new rule. This only affects communities, you can of course use your accounts on here to interact with other communities in the fediverse. I don't think I needed to say that, but I guess better safe than sorry? Please feel free to reach out with any suggestions!

Thank you!

Hey everyone,

I assuming if you are reading this, you also noticed that the instance has been down for a few hours. We have been struggling with some sort of traffic issue from our mlmym self-hosted instance at https://old.literature.com/. It had been flooding the instance with so many requests that it could not keep up. I went ahead and shut it down and we should be good to go for now. I'm not totally sure what that issue was but if I figure it out I will throw it in the comments.

I also learned today that mlmym has been abandoned by the developer. :(

Anyway hope everything is smooth sailing from here. I will post a more detailed "state of the server" later this week.

Thanks all!

EDIT:

I deployed Anubis in front of mlmym so https://old.literature.com/ is back up for anyone that uses that front end (me included). If this is successful, I mostly likely will deploy Anubis against the main frontend as well. Stay tuned for any announcements about that.

https://literature.cafe/ seems to be down.

https://lestat.org/ indicates that it has been down since midnight UTC.

Obviously only sh.itjust.works users will see this post right now, but I'd be curious for more info when the server is back up. Is there any way to get in touch with an admin when the server is down?

So sorry about that downtime, our VM was unexpectedly shut down. Everything should be up and federation will level out soon.

Again so sorry. I'm going to set up an uptime and status page on a different server so I can communicate if things go sideways again.

Hey everyone!

Sorry for the delay in the application process, I was out of town and very behind. I just approved a bunch of new users today and over the last few months.

If anyone wants to introduce themselves, ask for recommendations, get help, etc feel free to reply. I would love to hear more about the people in our little community here!

Enjoy!

We have updated to lemmy v0.19.10, you can read the release notes here.

Small release, except one notable "fix/feature" is the removal of PMs when a ban happens... I think we all know who that is for...

Enjoy! Feel free to PM if you have any issues at all with the instance. I know I'm a lurker, but I am trying my best to keep the instance humming along.

cross-posted from: https://literature.cafe/post/15172719

Hey everyone, I am working on a project for a science fiction college class. Initially I wanted to post a couple short stories I had ideas for on here, I still would like to do that. However as I started brainstorming and planning I realized one writing idea was longer form than a short story. So I still would like to post my short story once it is writing but I was wondering how people who write on here tend to actually start their writing, how much planning happens before ink hits paper as it were? Also how much help can newcomers find on Lemmy? I'd like to do a presentation on Lemmy as a resource similar to how reddit is commonly used. Any help would be appreciated!

We have updated!

v0.19.6 has the changelog that matters - https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-11-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.6

v0.19.7 fixes three regressions found in v0.19.6 - https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-11-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.7

No real new user-facing features, but a lot of optimization on the server-side to keep things snappy. Enjoy! Please reach out if you notice anything wonky!

The domain was also renewed. Thank you to @Arthur for all you do. Things seemed to have go pretty well.

Contemplating what kind of local only community we should make. A local only general forum perhaps?

Private communities will be coming! Woo!

Hey! We're still here. Just been busy, still checking and resolving reports though. The image server was fixed but unfortunately we are now experiencing email delivery issues, so be aware of that. We will likely need to switch to an SMTP service soon.

Hope everyone is doing well :)

Things seem to be working otherwise. But it's... yeah. I'll take a look as I can but yeah. If you upload images just use imgur I guess. 🤔

Images on remote instance should show up just fine though :-)

On none of my other accounts do I scroll through local. This is a uniquely great instance.

I wish their were more of these interest based instances. Other than fanaticus.social there was lemmy.film which is gone now. Wish the best for this instance.

Hope it keeps growing!

They seem to be primarily linked to a nostr relay right now, but knowing them I doubt theyll stay allowlist only for long.

Immediately defederated cause fuck that shit.

https://hilariouschaos.com/ (brain rot warning)

Now I'm crossposting from Lemmy to Mastodon, by tagging myself, @robertoqs@writing.exchange. Lemmy's “Title” field produces, conversely, an initial separated line in the resulting toot.

Edit: But only a link to Lemmy is displayed in said toot, and not the post's “Body” field.

Example Title for Lemmy

In case you're interested in #Crossposting from #Mastodon to #Lemmy and haven't done it before, please note that adding an initial separated line (like the one at the start of this toot) produces what otherwise is formatted via Lemmy's post creation “Title” field. It will be shown thus in @meta.

Edit: But “Example Title for Lemmy” is repeated in the Lemmy post's “Body” field.

Edit 2: Edits work when crossposting, too.

It was a relatively quick update, seems to have a fixed a multitude of issues that 0.19 caused.

Also, local only communities are in the pipeline. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4350

Local only communities will not federate and will be only seen by those with an account. As soon as it's implemented as a feature, I'll make a local only casual chat community for the instance if that sounds like a good plan?

I just mistakenly made a comment on my post on lemmy.world and while it shows deleted on jerboa (up to date app) I can see it on eternity and attempts at deleting say delete failed (not up to date) but more importantly I can view the comment from my main too.

Is this a federation issue thanks to 0.19, a pre existing federation issue or something else? This could be a serious issue if someone copy/pasted their password or smth by mistake (as I nearly did).

Hey yall, just wanted to pop in for a quick update. I'm here and very much alive and well. Things have been kinda dead off and on, just been recovering from medical stuff and just tending the server and occasionally popping in for the auto scheduled bot post.

Basically, I took a break from being super active here for my own well being to prevent from fully burning out. I'm feeling a bit better and am ready to dive back in to lemmy.

So, the elephant in the room. As some of you may already know, Meta's twitter clone thread's is actively making steps towards federation with AcivityPub. At baseline this doesn't really affect lemmy anyway since content is very broken out from lemmy into the outside world, and facebook is explicitly building with microblogging in mind. Lemmy is still in its infancy, and it likely will not work with threads when they fully federate anyway.

With that aside, we will not be federating with Facebook or any of its platforms. Beyond all the clear issues such as meta being an active danger human society (reading list can be provided if there's any interest about the evil of Meta/Facebook), I'm here to read and talk about books not mop up after Facebook. Moderation tools in Lemmy aren't up to par as is and the idea of federating with an instance nearly triple the current user count of the entire fediverse makes me feel ill. I hope yall understand.

That's about it, any questions? Thoughts? Concerns?

Just upgraded to a point release that should fix up some issues with federation to services outside of lemmy. Carry on everyone and enjoy.

Previous release notes here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue

Welcome to the highly anticipated update! Tons of changes in this release, but you might have noticed you were signed out. All sessions were terminated to allow for a more secure user auth flow. New post ranking algorithms and instance blocks for users are the headlining features, but there were almost 400 commits since 0.18.5 so please read the release notes if you are curious about the other big changes. Enjoy the update!