xtremeownage

As promised, if I brought the instance offline, I would give you a heads up in advance.

Here are the reasons for me coming to this decision-

Moderation / Administration

Lemmy has absolutely ZERO administration tools, other then the ability to create a report. This, makes it extremely difficult to properly administer anything.

As well, other then running reports and queries against the local database manually, I literally do not have insight into anything. I can't even see a list of which users are registered on this instance, without running a query on the database.

Personal Liability

I host lemmyonline.com on some of my personal infrastructure. It shares servers, storage, etc. It is powered via my home solar setup, and actually doesn't cost much to keep online.

However- for a project which compensates me exactly $0.00 USD (No- I still don't take donations). It is NOT worth the additional liability I am taking on.

That liability being- currently trolls/attackers are literally uploading child-porn to lemmy. Thumbnails and content gets synced to this instance. At that point, I am on the hook for this content. This, also goes back to the problem of literally having basically no moderation capabilities either.

Once something is posted, it is sent everywhere.

Here in the US, they like to send no-knock raids out. That is no-bueno.

Project Inefficiencies

One issue I have noticed, every single image/thumbnail, appears to get cached by pictrs. This data is never cleaned up, never purged.... so, it will just keep growing, and growing. The growth, isn't drastic, around 10-30G of new data per week- however, this growth isn't going to be sustainable, especially due to again- this project compensates me nothing. While- hosting 100G of content, isn't going to be a problem. When we start looking 1T, 10T, etc.... That costs money.

Its not as simple as tossing another disk into my cluster. The storage needs redundancy. So, you need multiple disks there.

Then, you need backups. A few more disks here.

Then, we need offsite backups. These cost $/TB stored.

I don't mind hosting putting some resources up front to host something that takes a nominal amount of resources. However- based on my stats, its going to continue to grow forever as there is no purge/timeout/lifespan attached to these objects.

I don't enjoy lemmy enough to want to put up with the above headaches.

Lets face it. You have already seen me complain about the general negativity around lemmy.

The quality of content here, just isn't the same. I have posted lots of interesting content to try and get collaboration going. But, it just doesn't happen.

I just don't see nearly as much interesting content, as I want to interact with.

Summary-

I get no benefit from hosting lemmy online. It was a fun side project for a while. I refuse to attempt to monetize it as well.

As such, since I don't enjoy it, and the process of keeping on top of the latest attacks for the week is time consuming, and boresome, The plan is simple.

The servers will go offline 2023-09-04.

If you wish to migrate your account to another instance-

Here is a tool recently released.

https://github.com/gusVLZ/lemmy_handshake

A heads up....

Since, attackers/etc are now uploading CSAM (child porn....) to lemmy, which gets federated to other instances....

Because I really don't want any reason for the feds to come knocking on my door, as of this time, pictrs is now disabled.

This means.... if you try to post an image, it will fail. As well, you will notice other issues potentially.

Driver for this: https://lemmyonline.com/post/454050

This- is a hobby for me. Given the complete and utter lack of moderation tools to help me properly filter content, the nuclear approach is the only approach here.

Both CloudNordic and Azero said that they were working to rebuild customers’ web and email systems from scratch, albeit without their data.

Yea.... Don't bother. But, do expect to hear from my lawyers.....

CloudNordic said that it “had no knowledge that there was an infection.” CloudNordic and Azero are owned by Denmark-registered Certiqa Holding, which also owns Netquest, a provider of threat intelligence for telcos and governments.

Edit-

https://www.cloudnordic.com/

I am just wondering... is it me- or is there a LOT of just general negativity here.

Every other post I see is...

1. America is bad.
2. Capitalism is bad. Socialism/Communism is good.
3. If you don't like communism, you are a fascist nazi.

Honestly, it's kind of killing my mood with Lemmy. There are a few decent communities/subs here, but, the quality of content appears to be falling.

I mean, FFS. It can't just be me that is noticing this. It honestly feels like I am supporting a communist platform here.

I am on social media to post and read about things related to technology, automation, race cars, etc.

Every other technology post, is somebody bashing on Elon Musk (actually- that is deserved), or talking about Reddit (Let it go. Seriously. We are here, it is there).

On my hobby of liking racecars, I guess, half of the people on lemmy feel it is OK to vandalize a car for being too big.... and car hate culture is pretty big.

All of this is really turning off my mood regarding lemmy.

Knock on wood, I have not used them in quite a while.

My adventures in building out a ceph cluster for proxmox storage.

As a random note, my particular instance (lemmyonline.com) is hosted on that particular ceph cluster.

Well... That didn't last long...