The Possum Patio Meta

Hey everyone, just a quick update on the downtime earlier this morning.

CSAM was posted to a community we federate with by a user from kbin.cafe, so I've taken the following actions:

• Purged that user and related media upload links from our database.
• Defederated from kbin.cafe, as their admin seems to have mostly abandoned the site.
• Upgraded to the release candidate of Lemmy 0.19, since it has new admin/moderation features that'll make handling cases like this easier in the future.

On the bright side, Lemmy 0.19 has some fancy new performance improvements and improved post ranking options! Stay tuned for a full feature overview soon from the Lemmy project folks.

(Edit) Here's some updates on 0.19 and breaking changes:

https://possumpat.io/post/1123074

https://possumpat.io/post/1639282

(Edit2)

We're now updated to the full 0.19 release!

As always, if you have any questions or concerns let me know.

Hey everyone! Quick instance update.

You may have noticed some server instability over the past few weeks with the site being slow or unresponsive. Today I upgraded the database hardware to better handle the federation traffic volume, so far seems like everything is humming along much more smoothly. 🎉

Over the past day, large lemmy instances were vandalized with CSAM spam. To ensure possumpat.io has no caching of these images, I'm rolling back the image database by a few days and currently pausing new image uploads.

You might see some server downtime as maintenance is done around this.

Even more performance updates! I was a bit slow getting this one rolled out as I was at FFXIV fanfest. 🙂

As always, let me know if you have any problems or questions.

Full changelog can be found here.

As you may have seen, lemmy.world was recently compromised due to an attacker gaining access to an Administrator account.

This exploit is related to the custom emoji feature, so as a precaution the few custom emoji we had so far have been removed.

As the attack involves hijacking an already logged-in account session, all user sessions have been reset - just in case any possumpat.io account was compromised while we had custom emoji enabled. I apologize for the inconvenience.

I'll update this post once we know more, and as always if you have any questions let me know.

Edit: For those interested in the technical details, this github thread details the vulnerability and ongoing efforts to mitigate it.

Edit: lemmy.world's post on the hack.

Edit: Exploit has been patched, will re-enable custom emoji soon.

Many backend performance improvments and some tweaks to the default web UI.

I'm personally seeing an issue with the update right now - The site theme is sometimes getting confused between light and dark mode. If you are encountering this, let me know. In the meantime, choosing a site theme in your user settings seems to fix the mixup.

With the upgrade to 0.18, we now have custom emoji support!

Feel free to suggest any emoji you like in the comments.

Lots of performance and UI improvements! As always let me know if anything seems missing or broken.

Site loading slow?

Can't find a community?

Questions about Lemmy/Fediverse?

Friend's registration application lost in the mail?

Post any and all questions about the instance here, and I'll see what I can do to help.

Hey everyone! Preston here. As The Possum Patio has already started growing a surprising amount since I set it up last week, I wanted to put some thoughts down on what the instance is right now, where it might be going, and some other general background info.

Background

Like many of you, I am (was?) a longtime user of Reddit - going on 13 years for me. The site was always an excellent time-waster and source of entertainment, but a couple years in I realized what really made reddit special to me were the niche communities. With old school forums generally going defunct over the past 20 years, Reddit was The Place to find discussions on that one weird niche JRPG nobody'd ever heard of, or find a fandom of some show that finished airing years ago. All those niches were what Reddit was to me, and as the site continues down the path of enshittification it'll be sad to see those niche spaces slowly decay over the coming years.

So! Reddit drama aside, the ethos of having niche communities is what I want to focus on for this Lemmy instance. The larger instances have the big umbrella topics already covered - I'm not interested in hosting (or moderating) a politics or general gaming community. I want to curate spaces that get into weird niche topics that I (and maybe you!) care about, spaces that seem to be missing from the larger Fediverse as of right now.

Communities

Right now, The Possum Patio hosts 8 communites:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

Currently, new community creation is disabled. Moderating and maintaining communities requires effort and time commitment from volunteers, and for now the only mods are myself and @brycethemilkman.

For now, I'm going to limit the total number of communities we host to around 10 or so. If we continue to grow I'd certainly consider expanding that number.

One last thought on communities - as the general Lemmy/Kbin userbase grows over the next few months, some of our communities might get pretty huge, some might not see much traffic or another "default" community for that topic may crop up elsewhere. Both of those things are good! I don't want to assert sole ownership over these spaces, I'll be happy whatever with whatever instance they find as a home.

Closing/Questions

Thanks for reading my rambling if you made it this far! I'm excited and honestly a bit nervous about the positive reception the instance has gotten - some of you were very flattering in your registration responses. 😊

If there's any questions or concerns you have, throw 'em down in the comments. As mentioned above, I'm open to creating about 2 more communities (maybe more if I really like the ideas) so feel free to suggest some.

-Preston

The Rules

1. Be Respectful.
   • No hate speech, bigotry, homophobia, ableism or transphobia.
2. Be Kind.
   • Other People will have different opinions and world views than you, and that's okay!
   • Views expressed in violation of Rule 1 will not be allowed.
3. NSFW content must be correctly tagged.
   • This is any nudity or extreme violence/gore
   • Post NSFW content sparingly. It's okay to be a little horny, but excessive NSFW posting will be moderated.
4. No Ads / Spam / Aggressive self-promotion.
   • No corporate advertisements or crypto scams, please.
   • If you're a small creator and want to post your content, great!
5. The Admin/Moderation team has the final say.
   • This instance is run as a hobby project and moderated by just a couple of volunteers.
   • We welcome your feedback and constructive criticism, but in general moderation actions aren't up for debate.