Sorry for the ~26 minutes of downtime, I might have left certbot in a 95% configured state last time I was making changes....

Blahaj's recent troubles have motivated me to take care of the OS updates I've been procrastinating on, such as our proxmox and various DB servers.

I'm expecting under 30 minutes to take care of it all, should be back by 9pm PST.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/66632160

Generalized 'Threadiverse' sections

Previously, we had separate guide sections for Lemmy and Piefed, with very few Piefed specific pages. Instead of writing a new set of pages for Piefed, we have generalized most of the Lemmy pages into pages that can be applied to any threadiverse platform. When the page can use additional Piefed specific information or screenshots, we added a "🛠️ Help Needed" card near the top.

This includes the following pages:

• threadiverse/overview
• threadiverse/detailed-overview
• threadiverse/alternative-uis
• threadiverse/apps
• threadiverse/finding-communities
• threadiverse/formatting-posts
• threadiverse/how-to-block
• threadiverse/how-to-deal-with-inappropriate-content
• threadiverse/how-to-open-in-my-instance

Since 'privacy' information will be specific to each platform, and there is more of a risk if a user is confused about that information, we are keeping those pages separate. The existing Lemmy page is still up, and there is a work-in-progress page for Piefed that a contributor is working on.

• https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/privacy-lemmy
• https://github.com/fedecan-ca/fedecan.ca/pull/63

At this time, the moderation, admin, and dev sections are still separate.

• We will likely generalize the moderation section next, once the example rule templates are ready
• The admin sections will likely stay separate
• The future of the dev section is uncertain, and it might be generalized to the fediverse level

Updated 'Alternative UIs' page

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/alternative-uis

The entries now follow a consistent format, and are sorted alphabetically after the default UIs. We have also added a summary table that compares all of the alternative UIs.

RSS feeds for announcements

These announcements are intended for users that have accounts on our platforms, or are interested in news about our organization.

You can use it by adding the following link to your RSS feed reader / aggregator: https://fedecan.ca/feed-en.xml

Other changes

Other changes include:

• Updated the wording on the "Our Platforms" section so that it is clearer for new users: https://fedecan.ca/en/#our-platforms
• We published a few older announcements to the website. They existed only as Lemmy/Piefed posts in the past: https://fedecan.ca/en/announcements
• Updated the donation page with a nicer comparison table and option cards. We did not make any changes to the donation options, that will come at a later time: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate
• We made fixes to the footer responsiveness and style

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/14579547

https://canvas.fediverse.events/

July 18th (4am UTC) to July 20th (also 4am UTC)

Canvas 2026 is in roughly 30 days!

Canvas is an annual event hosted for the Fediverse, allowing everyone to contribute to a pixel canvas, one pixel at a time

Check out the website for a live countdown, login testing, chat room (matrix/discord), and what last year's Canvas was!

If you are a developer, check out the source, and if you're a Fediverse app dev check the docs to add Canvas functionality to your app 👀

Mlem is adding support for Fediverse Events within their app ✨

Seems like the servers are very slow to respond to most requests, investigating the cause, stay tuned.

EDIT: Systems are back to normal now.

Thanks to a particularly annoying botnet, everyone's favorite anime cat girl firewall is now helping protect piefed.ca & lemmy.ca from bots and scrapers.

This is requests per second and these are all thousands of scrapers on residential IPs hammering us:

They'd increase their usage until the site started struggling, then move on. I banned their user agents, but have no interest in a cat & mouse game. Anubis should hopefully keep things running much smoother for everyone.

Let me know if you have any trouble!

Some recent threads have pulled lemmy.ca into the drama around lemmy.world and Luminous5481. We banned them a few days before LW did, and claims have been made that we're aligned with LW in the pro-zionist behavior LW has been accused of.

~8 days ago Luminous had "murder all Zionists" in their name, during which time they banned recursive_recursion@piefed.ca from the community agitprop memes. The reason given was "zionism, genocide apologia" with a 74 year expiry time. Recursive saw this, was confused and insulted by the insinuation / threat, and retaliatory banned Luminous. This happened 2 days before the LW issue began, and from our point of view was unrelated.

Recursive posted in our internal chat immediately after they placed the ban, letting us all know. We all agreed that being flippant about who Luminous labels a zionist while also repeatedly calling for the murder of zionists, wasn't appropriate for lemmy.ca. It violates our of our "Be Civil" rule, and is toxic behaviour that doesn't belong here.

None of us knew at the time why Recursive had been banned, although yesterday while digging I found this thread. Luminous placed the ban because Recursive had banned Deceptichum@quokk.au with a "suspiciously similar ban message" to one MrKaplan used. Recursive used "Troll and perpetual history of bad faith behavior" vs MrKaplan removing a comment as "troll". That's a pretty shitty reason to label someone a zionist genocide apologist, while you're calling for the murder of all zionists.

None of us support Israel, we're all horrified by what they're doing. That doesn't mean throwing around death threats on Lemmy should be tolerated.

Context if you're unfamiliar with this issue:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67441787
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67441443

Hi Lemmy!

I spent a long time making these botanical micro-art trading cards for myself. They are for each province and territory of Canada. Kind of a hobby. I did everything by hand, locally and offline, so every individual card has some variations to them.

I'm really curious if others would ever want something like this as Canadian made micro-art collectables, happy to figure out if it's just me who likes them or?

Thanks

Going through the sidebar all the rules are perfectly reasonable. Just curious if some communities implement additional rules in addition to the Lemmy.ca rules, and how would I go about knowing about them?

It would be great if we join it again.

I learned about a bunch of local musicians in the previous editions.

In order to comply with the bylaw, they would need to hire someone on-call who could respond to emergencies within an hour, and who could check the carbon monoxide and smoke detectors after every stay.

Wow, you mean you need to have someone who can actually respond to issues, particularly in a time-sensitive manner? Imagine that.

Hotels/Motels have extra fees they need to pay to the municipality, why should short term rentals be any different?

Just curious, I don't know if this feature would be in fedecans or lemmy's court to implement. I just know that it would be quite helpful to further develop communities.

If so, I hope it works with old.lemmy. I can't stand any other formats and it already frustrates me that certain features don't work with this format.

Hello everyone!

It’s time for another long-overdue update on how Fedecan and our various sites are doing. It’s been just over two years since the great Reddit migration, and in that time we’ve made some solid progress:

• Registered Fedecan.ca as a non-profit
• Moved from OVH to our own hardware in a Vancouver datacenter
• Started collaborating with the team behind sh.itjust.works
• Launched Pixelfed.ca
• Launched Piefed.ca

Finances

Here’s a look at our bank balance since we began accepting donations:

We’re currently sitting at around $2,900, with a monthly burn of about $200, which gives us roughly a year of runway. We have some additional annual costs (like domain renewals and non-profit registration), but overall we run very lean.

Fedecan still owes:

• TruckBC: $1,980
• Shadow (me): $525

These were out-of-pocket hosting and non-profit registration costs from 2023/2024. It’d be great to get those covered, but we want to keep at least a year of operating expenses in reserve.

If you're a regular user and value what we're doing, please consider donating! We have multiple ways to donate, you can find the comparison and donation links on our website: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate

Sh.itjust.works

Nothing major to report here - we’ve all been a bit busy lately, but collaboration is continuing slowly behind the scenes.

Fediverse Growth

We're seeing a healthy volume of posts and communities on lemmy.ca, surging with each Reddit drama:

Infrastructure

Our server is a Dell R7515 with an EPYC 7763, 1 TB ram and 4x 7.68tb nvme data disks, which is hosted in a datacenter in Vancouver, BC.

I spun up victoriametrics + victorialogs a few weeks ago and have been ingesting all of our data, giving us the ability to put together some nice grafana dashboards.

Everything is running great on the infrastructure side of things. Our server is barely working up a sweat and we shouldn't have to worry about scaling for a long time.

Lemmy.ca still comprises almost all of our traffic:

Lemmy.ca

Our over provisioned stack is performing well, handling the occasional lemmy / lemmy-ui dropout:

Similarly the DB is mostly running out of ram:

Our object storage is slowly climbing as expected, but we've got several years of capacity to figure out a long term solution:

I’m also doing some limited analytics on our web logs. As expected, lemmy.world makes up the majority of our federation traffic:

One interesting thing to see from the user-agent data is the breakdown of traffic by the different mobile clients:

The “dart” UA is just a common web library, Thunder reports as this and I suspect other clients do too. If you’re a client developer, please set your user-agent!

Out of the alternative web clients we support, tesseract is the most popular although the overall traffic volume is still low:

We only store 7 days of logs but I’m hoping to get these pulled out into metrics soon, since it would be interesting to track which clients / interfaces people use over time.

Pixelfed.ca

Not much to say on this one, due to using local storage it currently runs on a single VM without redundancy.

Piefed.ca

Piefed runs on a pair of VMs with its own database and object storage backends.

Cloudflare

If you want to compare against previous data posts, here’s our same cloudflare graphs for lemmy.ca

As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or ideas. Thanks for being a part of the Fediverse!

Hello, world! Recent lemm.ee migrant here moving into the neighborhood. My reference point is: https://fedecan.ca/en/donate

I'd like to request Liberapay support for donations - generally speaking it's a zero-fees frontend for Stripe/Paypal/Credit cards and SEPA if in EU (not applicable here). Most questions are answered via their FAQ page: https://liberapay.com/about/faq

As a user, Liberapay allows me to organize (and get reminders!) of all my donations regardless of individual payment source, turn them on off add more money, etc. Their preferred method to keep the lowest fees is, for example a monthly donation, to charge an entire year's worth of donations at once, then dole it out post-fees monthly themselves. In a sense, solves the "no Stripe recurring payments" problem and it's optional for the user to choose (but recommended). The Liberapay platform survives by people donating (meaning, they "eat their own dogfood" and use the platform they built to survive)

Liberapay has worked out great for me as a user for years supporting various open source projects and collectives of all types. Thank you for considering.

A few months ago, we posted a discussion thread about lemmit.online, which resulted in the decision to defederate from it:

https://lemmy.ca/post/38374922

The reasons were given as follows:

It feels actively harmful to lemmy, since so many of the posts it brings over are questions that the original poster will never see. It encourages a conversation that will never happen, so if someone does reply they’re going to feel disengaged.

The bot rarely gets any upvotes or engagement, and I suspect a majority of people (like myself) have just blocked it.

These reasons also apply to lululemmy.com, and so we just defederated from it as well. Same as before, if you were using it and miss it, let us know and we can reconsider.

To preface none of my fellow admins know about this post due to the language that I am using.
Although I do believe that they would be supportive of this as they care about our users just as much as I do.

I just had a run in with a user asking for help who then deleted their post and comments soon after.

If you see any users asking for help I would personally recommend a couple of things to look out for:

• Check their profile;
  • how old's the account?
  • what kinds of posts and comments are they making?
    • Are they the kind of user you'd be cool with being friends with?
  • Do they have history of deleting posts/comments? If so why? and how often?
• Check the modlog;
  • have they done or said anything that warrented themselves getting banned or their posts/comments removed?

I'm making this post as I'm personally frustrated seeing posts and comments being removed as it actively harms instances, communities, and most importantly users.

I absolutely despise when I go a saved post or comment thread that I wanted to reread later only to find that I can't cause the post/thread's been deleted by a single user.

There's so much useful or interesting and creative things that people care about and also want to share in terms of life experiences or just having a cool thing to collaborate and work on.

• having this be ruined by individuals that want to 'dine and dash' basically ruins this.

Honestly Fuck you.
If you 'help farm' especially I will find you and I will ban you because you are actively harming users who spend their precious time, effort, and humanly love to do cool stuff here on the Fediverse.

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-06-13_-_Lemmy_Release_0.19.12

Enjoy!

Would you like some pie? Check it out here: https://piefed.ca/

What is PieFed

PieFed follows a similar format as Lemmy and Mbin. Those that are familiar with Lemmy will find it very similar, with some additional features including topic lists, optional private voting, new mod and admin tools, crosspost de-duplication, community wikis, etc. Thanks to how the fediverse works, you can use either lemmy.ca or piefed.ca to interact freely!

We will put together some guides on our non-profit's website at some point. In the meantime, we have created !newtopiefed@piefed.ca for us to learn from each other. There is also the official !piefed_help@piefed.social community which has a similar purpose.

We have done some testing and we are learning as we go, but please bear with us while this new platform gets going 🙂

Other Links & FAQ

• lemmy.ca is not migrating to PieFed. We will run both instances at the same time. You can use whichever one you prefer.
• Learn about the differences between PieFed & Lemmy: https://join.piefed.social/features/
• A tour of the community moderation features in PieFed: https://piefed.social/post/844065
• One of the first mobile apps to implement support for PieFed, with more to come: https://interstellar.jwr.one/

Hey everyone, with the upcoming closure of lemm.ee I just wanted to say thank you to all the admins and mods of all the comms on .ca, and users! You all are what helps to make this the best instance of Lemmy! Doing those jobs for free can't be easy (admins/mods), what with all the douchebags that tend to populate the internet and make life harder for normal people that just want to chill. I know I certainly wouldn't have the patience to mod even a small comm, let alone help to be an admin of an entire instance.

I tend not to post or comment to much, always been that way, but I've been here since July of 2023 and I browse daily. The stability of this instance is awesome and I have nothing but respect for the admins that make this possible. The mods of all the .ca comms, and awesome users in general really help to make this the greatest instance on Lemmy.

Thank you to everyone, regardless of whether you're an admin, a mod, or just an average user posting their hot takes, shit posts, memes, and great discussion material etc.

Long live lemmy.ca!

Hello! Thank you to all involved in running this service :)

I think it is wonderful that this instance, and other services are run by

a registered non-profit organization based in Canada

Before spending a lot of time boosting the instance or donating, I wanted to verify the registration, but I wasn't able to find it where I searched. Could you provide a link or a pointer?

Thank you, again, for all that you're doing! <3

Good morning everyone. Just a quick heads up that I've banned a good chunk of IP space in China due to abusive traffic.

I've tried to restrict this where possible to datacenter blocks from Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba, but China Telecom / Mobile were also heavy sources of suspicious traffic. I doubt we have many (if any) users in China, but if you are affected please let me know.

This has been ongoing for a while and I ignored it initially since the traffic levels were low, but it wasn't anymore.

The ban has very visibly cut our traffic levels:

The maximum statistics shown on the Lemmy statistics page on Fedecan only goes out 2 years at most.

However, since the initial Reddit API exodus is now approaching the 2 year anniversery, this means that after this month, the Fedecan statistics pages would no longer be able to show the activity trends on Lemmy prior to the surge of users in June 2023. This is because after June 2025, the 2 year graphs would cut off before it would show the API exodus, as it becomes greater than 2 years old; and so it would not be displayed in the graphs after that time.

Would it be possible to add an additional set of graphs to all 4 statistics pages on Fedecan to show the all time statistics on Lemmy (i.e. with a fixed start date so it shows all statistics)?

Since the server went off of OVH, lemmy.ca has felt super snappy overall. Tonight I'm noticing lagspikes, and the status graph shows it too...

I'll check back in the morning, site's still usable so not an urgent matter. It'd be interesting for me to know what might be happening.

Morning edit: seems like a one off.

cross-posted from: https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.ml/post/29579005

Since we depend on them to have this platform, it seems fair to spread their request for donations. To be clear, this is to finance the developers who build this software, and has nothing to do with our specific instance operational costs.

From the Lemmy developers

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate