It's infra that was already hosting other things. Lemmy got added to it because there were spare resources in the cluster.
Oh man, I feel like eviltoast.org is on the expensive side of things now. There's less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo. Not including object storage or hardware running at home.
Realistically this is hosted on hardware I was already renting for other reasons, so actual cost is zero for lemmy itself. I could probably migrate to a small vm for $20/mo and only lose redundancy.
Server upgrades and Lemmy 0.19.3
eviltoast.org is now running Lemmy and Lemmy-ui 0.19.3. It was a relatively minor upgrade, but details are at the bottom of this post.
More importantly, I wanted to share that eviltoast.org has had a sizable upgrade. Specifically the database server is much larger than before and should be able to handle the load with less stress. Overall things should feel snappier.
I have some other ideas for improving the site's responsiveness in the near future, but this should be a good start. Please let me know if you do (or don't!) notice a difference in the meantime.
Thanks!
2024-01-22 - Lemmy Release v0.19.3 - A Few Bugfixes
Major Changes
- Fixed lemmy-ui error page bug by @Sleepless in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2302
- Fix bug with Mastodon undo follow activities by @Nutomic in [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/43
Please see https://eviltoast.org/post/3963121 - we are now on 0.19.2! Thanks for your patience.
Eviltoast.org successfully upgraded to 0.19.2
Hello all,
eviltoast.org has been upgraded to the latest lemmy and lemmy-ui releases (0.19.2).
We held off on the 0.19.0 and 0.19.1 releases due to some federation issues they had. These appear to be resolved with 0.19.2.
Release notes are below, but please reach out if you run into any issues!
Important note: There were changes to how auth works in lemmy. Some mobile clients (like liftoff) may no longer work. And on the browser, you may have to clear your cookies for eviltoast.org if you aren't able to log in.
Thanks!
2024-01-10 - Lemmy Release v0.19.2 - More Federation Fixes
Major Changes
- Outgoing federation bug fixes.
- Lemmy can now receive reports sent from Mastodon and Kbin.
- Added the ability for admins to view votes, to prevent downvote trolling. Demo. [#4088](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4
In case anyone is wondering, I'm still holding off on 0.19.1 because of this outgoing federation issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288
There is an open PR for it that might fix it. Assuming it does, we'll upgrade once it's merged in and released.
threads.net is now on the blocked list. Please do leave a comment if you disagree with this decision!
Hello and welcome!
I was holding off on 0.19.0 because of some performance issues other instances were having. It looks like that is probably fixed now though with 0.19.1 released today.
Unless there are any more big issues, it'll probably happen in the next day or so.
Defederating from Threads - Any objections?
Related post: https://eviltoast.org/post/833202
The current plan is to entirely defederate from Meta's Threads.
Does anyone on eviltoast.org (or anyone who uses it for browsing) have any objections to defederating from Threads?
A few of the reasons to defederate:
- Exponentially more users compared to the current lemmyverse
- Expected reduction in quality of content, but dramatic increase in quantity
- Federation Traffic from Threads may overwhelm smaller instances, including ours
- Lemmy still has a lack of good mod tools
- Future possibility of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" whether intentional or not
- Many people view lemmy and other federated platforms as a way to get away from giant coorporations
IMO the biggest reason to defederate is the amount of users and content that will be added to the network, I don't think Lemmy/Mastodon/etc as a whole is prepared for that yet.
Edit 2023-12-22: threads.net is now on the blocked list. Please do leave a comment if you di
👋 I am leaning towards defederating w/ Threads. Lemmy 0.19.0 does have a feature to block instances at the user level, and I was thinking that might help when we upgrade. But with so many users on threads (compared to lemmy), I don't think it'd be hard for threads to overwhelm everything.
I'm not even sure what sort of load impact it will have on servers. I can imagine a lot of instances will accidentally ddos themselves just by following stuff on threads.
Poor performance and sporadic downtime
Hello!
Apologies for the lack of updates. I just wanted to put up a quick message about this instance. Over the past month or so, there have been times where the site appeared either slow or altogether unresponsive.
Lemmy itself was always running but external monitoring tools would report brief outages and clients would be unable to connect. Usually only for a few seconds at a time.
This ended up being caused by stale DNS records. The infrastructure eviltoast.org is hosted on has multiple public-facing servers which act as load balancers for eviltoast and several other services. Occasionally the load balancers are moved to other servers and the DNS that points to them should get updated automatically.
At some point in the last month or so, the script that updates the DNS added the new records but never deleted the old ones. So depending on which server was used, the instance could appear unresponsive.
This script is fixed now and I tested a couple updates to make sure th
There isn't really a thought out stance on it so far.
I know a lot of instances are planning on preemptively blocking or defederating from threads, but I haven't decided if that's overkill or not.
I think it depends on if it ever actually happens, and also whether it ends up causing any issues. It probably won't get blocked by default, but we also don't want to get defederated and siloed from other instances.
What are your thoughts on it?
Updated community guidelines and legal disclaimer
There's been a lot of talk related to lemmy.world banning certain communities recently. It made me realize there's nothing explicitly saying "don't do anything illegal" here, and spurred a couple updates:
- Guidelines: Added two new items, one basically saying not to do anything illegal and the other a reminder that content is federated and public. Specifically these two new points:
- Don't spread the illegal jams - Ensure content adheres to the law and doesn't endanger the community.
- Public Toasting Grounds - Remember, everything you post is as public as a toast popping up! Content is shared with other instances, so once it's out, consider it part of the digital breakfast table forever.
- Disclaimer: We've made some tweaks to the wording on our legal page for clarity around content responsibility and liability. The core message remains the same.
To reiterate, this update doesn't indicate any impending actions to block or def
Server updated to Lemmy 0.18.4
eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.4.
Release notes copied below.
Changes
Lemmy
- Fix fetch instance software version from nodeinfo (#3772)
- Correct logic to meet join-lemmy requirement, don’t have closed signups. Allows Open and Applications. (#3761)
- Fix ordering when doing a commentparent type
list_comments(#3823)Lemmy-UI
Server updated to Lemmy 0.18.3
eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.3. For 0.18.1 and 0.18.2 we were using a custom patched build to fix some security issues, but now we are back on the officially released builds.
This release has a few performance improvements too.
Release notes copied below.
lemmy/RELEASES.md at main · LemmyNet/lemmy
Changes
Lemmy
- Restore markdown quotes after sanitize (#3708) (#3749)
- remove performance-problematic and buggy duplicate site aggregates (#3732)
- remove n^2 part of person triggers, improve community aggregate trigger (#3739)
- Revert "Add controversial ranking ([#3205](https://github.com/LemmyNet/le
By bot account, I just meant an account that's used by a script but not one anyone actually logs in to. Specifically, this guy: https://eviltoast.org/u/lemmyfollower
It's one thing I do like about Lemmy so far. If people mark accounts as bots when they're created, it makes it really easy to just filter out all posts made by bots. In your profile settings, you can turn off posts by bots and everything will be a lot less noisy because a lot of bots are just copying posts from reddit right now.
I left it unchecked sunce I’m not a bot lol.
Please solve the following captcha to confirm you are human:
I agree. In its current form, it's somewhat more similar to something like twitter (or mastodon) vs reddit, at least for newer small instances. I doubt they'll make it so everything gets federated everywhere by default since that'd be pretty bandwidth and disk intensive, but it'd make sense to at least be able to show those historical threads.
https://www.search-lemmy.com is trying to index all lemmy instances. https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search/issues/20 is open to track opening those search results inside your home lemmy instance. Maybe lemmy-ui or one of the other frontends will end up integrating with it so that you can search for anything and have it pull the results into the instance you're using?
Now automatically discovering and subscribing to communities
eviltoast.org is now discovering new communities automatically as long as they meet these criteria:
- At least 15 subscribers
- At least
5020 comments - At least
5020 posts
This means any remote community that matches the above criteria should show up when searching for communities.
I'm hoping this will help with discovering useful communities without needing 3rd party tools.
Due to the way lemmy works, the above communities are only "discovered" and we will not start getting federated posts/comments/updates for them until at least one account subscribes to the community.
In addition to the above criteria, any remote communities with over 500 100 active subscribers in the last month will also automatically be followed by a bot account.
These changes are already in place. After a few days, the above numbers might get changed to start pulling in more communities.
https://lemmyverse.net is the source being used for filtering remote commun
You've got it right, I agree is kind of weird, but it looks like it is by design (so far): https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2825
I'm waiting for some sort of "remote" search, I think that'd solve a lot of weird issues if we could get results from more than just the local instance.
As far as I've seen so far, posts and comments only start showing up from the time you subscribe to a community. When you manually search for a specific community and subscribe to it, I think it does pull the last 20 or so posts, but not the comments for those posts. There's no backfill or history fetching in lemmy.
The script I'm using to pull in popular communities is the same as searching for each community it finds, so it doesn't actually subscribe or pull posts either. I might try that for a few days though and see what happens, I'm not sure how much it'd cause the disk or network to explode.
test:
Yup, it's one of the main downsides so far. There's not really a good built in way to discover remote communities yet.
There's the lemmyverse link and a few similar apps that all aggregate communities into one list, using one of those is easiest imo for now.
I think I can finish the script I was working on to import all or most communities so that they show up in the search results, but the subscriber count will still only reflect the local users and not the real count.
firefox
Got it, thanks!
So on lemmy.world, we get:
undefined
[email protected] - 1.48K subscribers Firefox - 1K subscribers [email protected] - 752 subscribers Firefox CSS - 146 subscribers Firefox [email protected] - 30 subscribers Firefox Browser (Linux und Android)@feddit.de - 30 subscribers FF addons&[email protected] - 3 subscribers [email protected] - 3 subscribers
But on eviltoast.org, we only get:
undefined
[email protected] - 3 subscribers [email protected] - 3 subscribers
The reason the others don't show up is because nobody on this instance is subscribed to them yet, and haven't searched explicitly for it. I'm working on a new script that populates the local list of communities from lemmyverse, but I also noticed the data there doesn't match up with lemmy.world. On https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=firefox&order=posts I don't even see [email protected] for some reason.
I was only going to automatically add communities with more than 50 posts/comments, but I might lower that too.
If you want to subscribe to something not in the search though, you can still do that by searching for the url of the community like "https://lemmy.world/c/firefoxcss". You might have to give it a couple seconds and try again, but it should show up.
Thanks! I saw that last night and deployed a custom docker image w/ the patches before the official release could be made, so we should have been fine. We'll update to the official release once it's out. I double checked the database and made sure any comments/posts that were federated over with the exploit had been removed as well.
major communities only have like 3 subscribers,
I think it's just due to the way lemmy is showing subscribers. If you go to https://eviltoast.org/communities?listingType=All&page=1 - it only shows the "local" subscriber count, so accounts from this instance subscribed to those communities even though those communities aren't local.
There's this feature request open to improve that, hopefully something similar will get implemented: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1824
I'm guessing the users/month is more accurate, but I haven't checked how that gets calculated.
If you're looking for specific communities, I've had better luck using https://lemmyverse.net/communities so far.
missing a lot of search results for communities
I'll check, can you send an example of something missing?
👋 Hello and welcome!
Server updated to Lemmy 0.18.1
eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.1. Release notes copied below.
Release v0.18.1 Release · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub
What's Changed
- Remove
actix_rt& use standard tokio spawn by @cetra3 in #3158- Add TLS support for diesel-async database connections by @sunaurus in #3189
- after 30 days, replace comment.content and post.body with 'Deleted' by @vijaykramesh in #3208
- Add separate Post check for isvalidbody_field by @Neshura87 in #3263
- feat: allow all admins to purge content by @TKilFree in [#3271](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pul
Testing after upgrade to 0.18.1
Welcome!
Thanks for joining the eviltoast.org lemmy instance!
We're still figuring out how all of this works, but lemmy itself should be relatively stable for now. I plan on also launching a new Matrix server in the next week or so as well, using the same domain.
If you're new to lemmy, I recommend checking out this post from lemmy.world to get started:
For mobile clients, Jerboa and Liftoff have both been good so far. Jerboa is the official client, but Liftoff felt a little more friendly. Mllem seems to be a decent ios client, but I haven't not used it much yet.
There isn't really any content locally on eviltoast.org right now, so I'd recommend setting your default view to either All or Subscribed so that you actually see something in your feed. That said, you're more than welcome to create communities and post locally as well as to other lemmy instances from here.