It's our Birthday! 🎂

It's been a wild ride over the past year. I still remember hearing about a federated platform that could be a user driven version of Reddit.

And how we have grown!

Thank you to everyone, old and new who has had an account here. I know we've had our ups and downs, slow servers, botched migrations, and finding out just because we are on the otherside of the world Lemmy can't handle it, but we are still here and making it work!

If I could go back and make the choice again. Honestly, I'd probably make the same choice. While it has been hectic, it has been enjoyable to the n'th degree.
I've made friends and learnt a lot. Not just on a technical level but a fair amount on a personal level too.

We have successfully made a community of over 300 people who regularly use Reddthat as their entryway into the Lemmyverse. Those numbers are real people, making real conversations.

Here's to another amazing year!

Tiff

PS: I'm still waiting for that first crypto donation 😜

PPS: Would anyone like a Hoodie with some sort of Reddthat logo/design? I know I would.

April is here and we're still enjoying our little corner of the lemmy-verse! This post is quite late for our April announcement as my chocolate coma has only now subsided

Donations

Due to some recent huge donations recently on our Ko-Fi we decided to migrate our database from our previous big server to a dedicated database server. The idea behind this move was to allow our database to respond faster with a faster CPU. It was a 3.5GHz cpu rather than what we had which was a 3.0GHz. This, as we know, did not pan out as we expected.After that fell through we have now migrated everything to 1 huge VPS in a completely different hosting company (OVH).

Since the last update I used the donations towards setting up an EU proxy to filter out down votes & spam as a way to try and respond faster to allow us to catch up. We've purchased the new VPS from OVH (which came out of the Ko-Fi money), & did the test of the separate database server in our previous hosting company.

Our Donations as of (7th of April):

• Ko-Fi: $280.00
• OpenCollective: $691.55 (of that 54.86 is pending payment)

Threads Federation

Straight off the bat, I'd like to say thank you for those voicing your opinions on the Thread federation post. While we had more people who were opposed to federation and have since deleted their accounts or moved communities because of the uncertainty, I left the thread pinned for over a week as I wanted to make sure that everyone could respond and have a general consensus. Many people bought great points forward, and we have decided to block Threads. The reasoning behind blocking them boils down to:

• Enforced one-way communication, allowing threads users to post in our communities without being able to respond to comments
• Known lack of Moderation which would allow for abuse

These two factors alone make it a simple decision on my part. If they allowed for comments on the post to make it back to a threads user then I probably would not explicitly block them. We are an open-first instance and I still stand by that. But when you have a history of abusive users, lack of moderation and actively ensure your users cannot conduct a conversation which by definition would be 2 way. That is enough to tip the scales in my book.

Decision: We will block Threads.net starting immediately.

Overview of what we've been tackling over the past 4 weeks

In the past month we've:

• Re-configured our database to ensure it could accept activities as fast as possible (twice!)
• Attempted to move all lemmy apps to a separate server to allow the database to have full use of our resources
• Purchased an absurd amount of cpus for a month to give everything a lot of cpu to play with
• Setup a haproxy with a lua-script in Amsterdam to filter out all 'bad' requests
• Worked with the LW Infra team to help test the Amsterdam proxy
• Rebuilt custom docker containers for added logging
• Optimised our nginx proxies
• Investigated the relationship between network latency and response times
• Figured out the maximum 3r/s rate of activities and notified the Lemmy Admin matrix channel, created bug reports etc.
• Migrated our 3 servers from one hosting company to 1 big server at another company this post

This has been a wild ride and I want to say thanks to everyone who's stuck with us, reached out to think of ideas, or send me a donation with a beautiful message.

The 500 mile problem (Why it's happening for LemmyWorld & Reddthat)

There are a few causes of this and why it effects Reddthat and a very small number of other instances but the main one is network latency. The distance between Australia (where Reddthat is hosted) and Europe/Americas is approximately 200-300ms. That means the current 'maximum' number of requests that a Lemmy instance can generate is approximate 3 requests per second. This assumes a few things such as responding instantly but is a good guideline.

Fortunately for the lemmy-verse, most of the instances that everyone can join are centralised to the EU/US areas which have very low latency. The network distance between Paris and Amsterdam is about 10ms. This means any instances that exist in close proximity can have an order of magnitude of activities generated before they lag behind. It goes from 3r/s to 100r/s

• Servers in EU<->EU can generate between 50-100r/s without lagging
• Servers in EU<->US can generate between 10-12r/s without lagging
• Servers in EU<->AU can generate between 2-3r/s without lagging

Already we have a practical maximum of 100r/s that an instance can generate before everyone on planet earth lags behind.

Currently (as of writing) Lemmy needs to process every activity sequentially. This ensures consistency between votes, edits, comments, etc. Allowing activities to be received out-of-order brings a huge amount of complexity which everyone is trying to solve to allow for all of us (Reddthat et al.) to no longer start lagging. There is a huge discussion on the git issue tracker of Lemmy if you wish to see how it is progressing.

As I said previously this assumes we respond in near real-time with no processing time. In reality, no one does, and there are a heap of reasons because of that. The biggest culprit of blocking in the activity threads I have found (and I could be wrong) is/was the metadata enrichment when new posts are added. So you get a nice Title, Subtitle and an image for all the links you add. Recent logs show it blocks adding post activities from anywhere between 1s to 10+ seconds! Since 0.19.4-beta.2 (which we are running as of this post) this no longer happens so for all new posts we will no longer have a 5-10s wait time. You might not have image displayed immediately when a Link is submitted, but it will still be enriched within a few seconds. Unfortunately this is only 1 piece of the puzzel and does not solve the issue. Out of the previous 24hours ~90% of all recieved activities are related to votes. Posts are in the single percentage, a rounding error.

This heading is in reference to the 500 miles email.
Requests here mean Lemmy "Activities", which are likes, posts, edits, comments, etc.

So ... are we okay now?

It is a boring answer but we wait and enjoy what the rest of the fediverse has to offer. This (now) only affects votes between LemmyWorld to Reddthat. All communities on Reddthat are successfully federating to all external parties so your comments and votes are being seen throughout the fediverse. There are still plenty of users in the fediverse who enjoy the content we create, who interact with us and are pleasant human beings. This only affects votes because of our forcing federation crawler which automatically syncs all LW posts and comments. We've been "up-to-date" for over 2 weeks now.

It is unfortunate that we are the ones to be the most affected. It's always a lot more fun being on the outside looking in, thinking about what they are dealing with and theorising solutions. Knowing my fellow Lemmy.nz and aussie.zone were affected by these issues really cemented the network latency issue and was a brilliant light bulb moment. I've had some hard nights recently trying to manage my life and looking into the problems that are effecting Reddthat. If I was dealing with these issues in isolation I'm not sure I would have come to these conclusions, so thank you our amazing Admin Team!

New versions means new features (Local Communities & Videos)

As we've updated to a beta version of 0.19.4 to get the metadata patches, we've already found bugs in Lemmy (or regressions) and you will notice if you use Jerboa as a client. Unfortunately, rolling back isn't advisable and as such we'll try and get the issues resolved so Jerboa can work.
We now have ability to change and create any community to be "Local Only".

With the migration comes support for Video uploads, Limited to under 20MB and 10000 frames (~6 minutes)! I suggest if you want to shared video links to tag it with [Video] as it seems videos on some clients don't always show it correctly.

Thoughts

Everyday I strive to learn about new things, and it has certainly been a learning experience! I started Reddthat with knowing enough of alternate technologies, but nearly nothing of rust nor postgres. 😅
We've found possibly a crucial bug in the foundation of Lemmy which hinders federation, workarounds, and found not all VPS providers are the same. I explained the issues in the hosting migration post. Learnt a lot about postgres and tested postgres v15 to v16 upgrade processes so everyone who uses the lemmy-ansible repository can benefit.
I'm looking forward to a relaxing April compared to the hectic March but I foresee some issues relating to the 0.19.4 release, which was meant to be released in the next week or so. 🤷

Cheers,

Tiff

PS. Since Lemmy version 0.19 you can block an instance yourself without requiring us to defederate via going to your Profile, clicking Blocks, and entering in the instance you wish to be blocked.

Fun Graphs:

Instance Response Times:

Data Transfers:

Basically, I'm sick of these network problems, and I'm sure you are too. We'll be migrating everything: pictrs, frontends & backends, database & webservers all to 1 single server in OVH.

First it was a cpu issue, so we work around that by ensuring pictrs is on another server, and have just enough CPU to keep us all okay. Everything was fine until the spammers attacked. Then we couldn't process the activities fast enough, and now we can't catch up.

We are having constant network drop outs/lag spikes where all the networking connections get "pooled" with a CPU steal of 15%. So we bought more vCPU and threw resources at the problem. Problem temporarily fixed, but we still had our "NVMe" VPS, which housed our database and lemmy applications showing an IOWait of 10-20% half the time. Unbeknown to me, that it was not IO related, but network related.

So we moved the database server off to another server, but unfortunately that caused another issue (the unintended side effects, of cheap hosting?). Now we have 1 main server accepting all network traffic, which then has to contact the NVMe DB server and pict-rs server as well. Then send all that information back to the users. This was part of the network problem.
Adding backend & frontend lemmy containers to the pict-rs server helped alleviate and is what you are seeing at the time of this post. Now a good 50% of the required database and web traffic is split across two servers which allows for our servers to not completely be saturated with request.

On top of the recent nonsense, it looks like we are limited to 100Mb/s, that's roughly 12MB/s. So downloading a 20MB video via pictrs would require the current flow: (in this example)

• User requests image via cloudflare
• (its not already cached so we request it from our servers)
• Cloudflare proxies the request to our server (app1).
• Our app1 server connects to the pictrs server.
• Our app1 server downloads the file from pictrs at a maximum of 100Mb/s,
• At the same time, the app1 server is uploading the file via cloudflare to you at a maximum of 100Mb/s.
• During this point in time our connection is completely saturated and no other network queries could be handled.

This is of course an example of the network issue I found out we had after moving to the multi-server system. This is of course not a problem when you have everything on one beefy server.

Those are the board strokes of the problems.

Thus we are completely ripping everything out and migrating to a HUGE OVH box. I say huge in capital letters because the OVH server is $108/m and has 8 vCPU, 32GB RAM, & 160GB of NVMe. This amount of RAM allows for the whole database to fit into memory. If this doesn't help then I'd be at a loss at what will.
Currently (assuming we kept paying for the standalone postgres server) our monthly costs would have been around $90/m. ($60/m (main) + $9/m (pictrs) + $22/m (db))

Migration plan:

The biggest downtime will be the database migration as to ensure consistency we need to take it offline. Which is just simpler than

DB:

• stop everything
• start postgres
• take a backup (20-25 mins)
• send that backup to the new server (5-6 mins (Limited to 12MB/s)
• restore (10-15 mins)

pictrs

• syncing the file store across to the new server

app(s)

• regular deployment

Which is the same process I recently did here so I have the steps already cemented in my brain. As you can see, taking a backup ends up taking longer than restoring. That's because, after testing the restore process on our OVH box we were no where near any IO/CPU limits and was, to my amazement, seriously fast. Now we'll have heaps of room to grow with a stable donation goal for the next 12 months.

See you on the other side.

Tiff

In the past 24-48 hours we've done a lot of work as you may have noticed, but you might be wondering why there are posts and comments with 0 upvotes.

Normally this would be because it is from a mastodon-like fediverse instance, but for now it's because of us and is on purpose.

Lemmy has an API where we can tell it to resolve content. This forces one of the most expensive parts of federation (for reddthat) , the resolving of post metadata, to no longer be blocking. So when new posts get federated we can answer quicker saying "we already know about that, tell us something we don't know"!

This makes the current activity graphs not tell the whole story anymore as we are going out-of-band. So while the graphs say we are behind, in reality we are closer than ever (for posts and comments).

Shout out to the amazing @example@reddthat.com who thought up this crazy idea.

Tldr, new posts are coming in hot and fast, and we are up-to-date with LW now for both posts and comments!

There was a period on an hour where we migrated our database to it's own server in the same data centre.

This server has faster CPUs than our current one, 3.5GHz v 3.0GHz, and if all goes well we will migrate the extra CPUs we bought to the DB server.

The outage was prolonged due to a PEBKAC issue. I mistyped an IP in our new postgres authentication as such I kept getting a "permission error".

The decision of always migrating the DB to it's own server was always going to happen but was pushed forward with the recent donations we got from Guest on our Ko-Fi page! Thank-you again!

If you see any issues relating to ungodly load times please feel free to let us know!

Cheers,
Tiff

Our server rebooted and unfortunately I had not saved our new firewall rules. This blocked all Lemmy services from accessing our databases.

This has now been fixed up! Sorry to everyone for the outage!

Edited: this post to be the Lemmy.World federation issue post.

We are now ready to upgrade to postgres 16. When this post is 30 mins old the maintenace will start

Updated & Pinned a Comment in this thread explaining my complete investigation and ideas on how the Lemmy app will & could move forward.

Recently beehaw has been hung out to dry with Open Collective dissolving their Foundation which was their hosted collective. Basically, the company that was holding onto all of beehaw's money, will no longer accept donations, and will close. You can read more in their alarmingly titled post: EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT: Open Collective Foundation is dissolving, and Beehaw needs your help
While this does not affect us, it certainly could have been us. I hope the Beehaw admins are doing okay and manage to get their money back. From what I've seen it should be easy to zero-out your collective, but "closure" and "no longer taking donations" make for a stressful time.

Again, Reddthat isn't affected by this but it does point out that we are currently at the behest of one company (person?) from winning the powerball or just running away with the donations.

Fees

Upon investigating our financials we are actually getting stung on fees quite often. Forgive me if I go on a rant here, skip below for the donation links if you don't want to read about the ins and outs. OpenCollective uses Stripe, which take 3% + $0.30 per transaction. Thats pretty much an industry standard. 3% + 0.30. Occasionally it's 3% + 0.25 depending on the payment provider Stripe uses internally. What I didn't realise is that Open Collective also pre-fills the donation form. This defaults to 15.00%. So in reality when I have set the donation to be $10, you end up paying $11.50. $1.50 goes to Open Collective, and then Stripe takes $0.48 in transaction fees. Then, when I get reimbursed for the server payments, Stripe takes another payment fee, because our Hosted Collective also has to pay a transfer fee. (Between you and me, I'm not sure why that is when we are both in Australia... and inter-bank transactions are free). So of that $11.50 out of your pocket, $1.50 goes to Open Collective, Stripe takes $0.48, then at the end of the month I lose $0.56 per expense! We have 11 donators so and 3 expenses per month, which works out to be another $0.15 per donator. So at the end of the day, that $11.50 becomes $9.37. A total difference of $2.13 per donator per month.

As I was being completely transparent I broke these down to 3 different transactions. The Server, the extra ram, and our object storage. Clearly I can save $1.12/m by bundling all the transactions, but that is not ideal. In the past 3 months we have paid $26.83 in payment transaction fees.

After learning this information, anyone who has recurring donations setup should check if the would like to continue giving 15% to Open Collective or not, or pass that extra 15% straight to Reddthat instead!

So to help with this outcome we are going to start diversifying and promoting alternatives to Open Collective as well as attempting to publish, maybe a specific page which I can update like /donate. But for the moment we will update our sidebar and main funding page.

Donation Links

From now on we will be using the following services.

• Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/reddthat
  • (best for once off donations)
  • 0% on once-off donations
  • 5% on all recurring (Unless I pay them $8/month for 0% fee)
• Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/reddthat
  • (best for recurring donations)
  • Stripe 3% + $0.3 (+ $0.58 Expense fee/month)
• Crypto:
  • Donate Crypto (Trocador)
  • Donate Crypto (Trocador Onion)
• XMR Directly: 4286pC9NxdyTo5Y3Z9Yr9NN1PoRUE3aXnBMW5TeKuSzPHh6eYB6HTZk7W9wmAfPqJR1j684WNRkcHiP9TwhvMoBrUD9PSt3
• BTC Directly: bc1q8md5gfdr55rn9zh3a30n6vtlktxgg5w4stvvas

I'm looking into Librepay as well but it looks like I will need to setup stripe myself, if I can do that in a safe way (for me and you) then I'll add that too.

Next Steps

From now on I'll be bundling all expenses for the month into one "Expense" on Open Collective to minimise fees as that is where most of the current funding is. I'll also do my best to do a quarterly budget report with expenditures and a sum of any OpenCollective/Kofi/Crypto/etc we have.

Thank you all for sticking around!

Tiff

Just got the server back up into a working state, still investigating why it decided to kill itself.

Unfortunately dealing with $job all day today with things randomly breaking like this. I'm guessing leap year shenanigans, but have no way in knowing that yet.

Just wanted to let you all know it's back up!

Unfortunately we had a Valentine's Day outage of around 2 hours.

Incident Timeline: (times in UTC)

04:39 - Our monitoring sees a 50x error.
04:41 - I am alerted via email & phone.
04:48 - I acknowledge the incident and start investigating
04:50 - I cannot access the VM via SSH. I issue a reboot via our control panel.
04:54 - Our server has a load of 12 and an 57% of all IO operations are IOWait.
05:30 - I issue another reboot and can't seem to figure out what's wrong
05:58 - I lodge a ticket with our provider to check the host, and to power off and on again as we still have huge IOWait values, and 100% Memory usage.
06:30 - hosting company hasn't got back to me and I start investigating by rolling back the latest configuration changes I've done & reboot.
06:35 - sites are back online.

Resolution

Latest change included turning on huge pages with a value of 100MB to allow postgres to get some performance gains.
This change was done on Monday morning and I had planned to do a power cycle this week to confirm everything was on the up-and-up. Turns out my host did that for me.

The outage lasted longer than it should have due to some $job and $life.

Until next time,
Cheers,
Tiff

Happy leap year! February comes with a fun 29th day? What will we do with the extra 24 hours? Sorry I missed the January update but I was too busy living the dream in cyberspace.

Community Funding

As always, I'd like to thank our dedicated community members who keep the lights on. Unfortunately our backup script went a little haywire over this last couple months and it resulted in a huge bill regarding our object storage! This bug has been fixed and new billing alerts have been updated to ensure this doesn't happen again.

If you are new to Reddthat and have not seen our OpenCollective page it is available over here. All transactions and expenses are completely transparent. If you donate and leave your name (which is completely optional) you'll eventually find your way into our main funding post over here!

Upcoming Postgres Upgrade

In the admin matrix channels there has been lots of talk about database optimisations recently as well as the issues relating to out of memory (OOM) errors. These OOM issues are mostly in regards to memory "leaks" and is what was plaguing Reddthat on a weekly basis. The good news is that other instance admins have confirmed that Postgres 16 (we are currently on Postgres 15) fixes those leaks and performs better all around!

We will be planning to upgrade Postgres from 15 to 16 later on this month (February). I'm tentatively looking at performing it during the week of the 18th to 24th. This will mean that Reddthat will be down for the period of the maintenance. I expect this to take around 30 minutes, but further testing on our development machines will produce a more concrete number.

This "forced" upgrade comes at a good time. As you may or may not be aware by our uptime monitoring we have been having occasional outages. This is because of our postgres server. When we do a deploy and make a change, the postgres container does not shutdown cleanly. So when it restarts it has to perform a recovery to ensure data consistency. This recovery process normally requires about 2-3 minutes where you will see an unfortunate error page.
This has been a sore spot with me as it is most likely an implementation failure on my part and I curse to myself whenever postgres decides to restart for whatever reason. Even though it should not restart because I made a change on a separate service. I feel like I am letting us down and want to do better! These issues leads us into the next section nicely.

Upcoming (February/March) "Dedicated" Servers

I've been playing with the concept of separating our services for a while now. We now have Pictrs being served on different server but still have lemmy, the frontends and the database all on our big single server. This single server setup has served us nicely and would continue to do so for quite some time but with the recent changes to lemmy adding more pressure onto the database we need to find a solution before it becomes an even bigger problem.
The forced postgres upgrade gives us the chance to make this decision and optimise our servers to support everyone and give a better experience on a whole.

Most likely starting next month (March) we will have two smaller front-end servers, which will contain the lemmy applications, a smallish pictrs server, and a bigger backend server to power the growing database. At least that is the current plan. Further testing may make us re-evaluate but I do not forsee any reason we would change the over-arching aspects.

Lemmy v0.19 & Pictrs v0.5 features

We've made it though the changes to v0.19.x and I'd like to say even with the unfortunate downtimes relating to Pictrs' temp data, we came through with minor downtimes and (for me) better appreciation of the database and it's structure.

Hopefully everyone has been enjoying the new features. If you use the default web-ui, you should also be able to upload videos, but I would advise against it. There is still the limit of the 10 second request regarding uploads, so unless your video is small and short it won't complete in-time.

Closing

It has been challenging over the past few months and especially with communities not as active as they once were. It almost seems that our little instance is being forgotten about and other instances have completely blown up! But it is concerning that without 1 or 2 people our communities dry up.

As an attempt to breathe life into our communities, I've started a little Community Spotlight initiative. Where every 1-2 weeks I'll be pinning a community that you should go and checkout!

The friendly atmosphere and communities is what make me want to continue doing what I do in my spare time. I'm glad people have found a home here, even if they might lurk and I'll continue trying to make Reddthat better!

Cheers,
Tiff
On behalf of the Reddthat Admin Team.

We've finally updated to 0.19 after some serious wrangling with the database migrations.

You need to re-login on your apps, & reset 2FA if you had it

Basically it went super smooth on dev, (because the dev db was super-ish small). Turned out the regular pruning of the activities (sent/received) were not happening on production, so the database had grown to over 90GB!

It's finally sorted itself and everything is right with the world.

🚀

Cool New Features:

• Instance blocks, for Users!
• Import/Export Settings!
• a 60 minute downtime 😜
• "working" 2FA

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

Cheers,
Tiff

Edit 1.

There was/is a known bug relating to outgoing federation (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4288) which we are hoping to be fixed with 0.19.1-rc1. To ensure we can federate with everyone we have updated to our first "beta" version in production. '-rc1'

Hello Everyone, I would like to wish everyone a happy New Year period where we've decided as a human race to stop working and start enjoying spending copious amounts of money on loved ones, items for ourselves, or just relishing the time to relax and recuperate.
Whatever your desired state of mind while the New Year period is we at Reddthat hope you enjoy it!

Community Funding

First up, I'd like to thank our dedicated community members who keep the lights on. Knowing that together we are creating a little home on the internet pleases me to no end. Thankyou!
A special mention to our first time contributors as well. Welcome to Reddthat: Ashley & Guest!

If you are new to Reddthat and have not seen our OpenCollective page it is available over here. All transactions and expenses are completely transparent. If you donate and leave your name you'll eventually find your way into our main funding post over here

User Statistics

As some of you might know, the Lemmy-verse is not populated as it once was back when people were thinking of a max-exodus. But do not be dismayed! These graphs show the dedication of our userbase rather than a dying platform.
These lines are replicated across all of the biggest instances not just our own. If you are interested checkout Fediverse Observer who I borrowed these graphs from. Thank-you!

I'm proud to know that over 250 people are using the services we provide & I hope you are enjoying it too!

A rise of close to 5000 comments MoM goes to show that we have a healthy amount of users in the fediverse who are actively interacting and communicating.

Users

Posts/Comments

Server Stability (Maintenance Windows) & Future Plans

The server has been rock solid the past month(s) since the last update. Except for 2 unscheduled outages, one when our hosting provider restarted the underlying host. This was during their weekly maintenance window so I can't be completely mad at them and was due to them finishing migrating everything between the old host we were on.

For everyone's information, the maintenance windows are: (UTC)

• Friday nights -- 22:00 to 01:00
• Tuesday afternoons -- 12:00 to 16:00

The majority of the time you will never see downtime during these periods but if you do happen to see high load times or error pages, that will be the cause. Due to the nature of this, I also perform maintenance during these periods such as system updates.

Dedicated server?

Our eventual plan was to always purchase a dedicated server with a beefy CPU & NVMe drive to enable us to do 3 things:

• Provide fast database queries to reduce latency and give a snappy experience
• On-demand support for encoding videos to allow you to post video memes
• Allow for growth to over 10k active users per month

Black Friday/Cyber Monday not withstanding, dedicated servers cost on average A$150-200/m. You can get better deals with other providers but for budgeting wise it is a good range.

With the bots leaving and some people deciding federated platforms were not right for them, the decisions are answered for us. While it would be good to provide a slightly faster experience, or be able to withstand over 10k active users per day, we are not there yet.
Our current solutions have growing room for the foreseeable future and until we outgrow our server it seems prudent not willingly waste money.

We have always been community funded and the trust that you have given us to make the best call for our future is something that I will not squander.

Lemmy v0.19 & Pictrs v0.5 features (coming soon)

The new version of Lemmy is getting closer and closer to being ready for fediverse-wide adoption for everyone to use (as in next week!). As previously stated in our October update there will be teething issues for those with 2FA but we are here for you.

Pictrs (the app which processes all the pictures/memes/gifs/videos) is due to release 0.5 soon as well. Which brings with it new database support, specifically postgres. This is the same database which Lemmy runs on, which means all Lemmy server admins will be able to run multiple pictrs instances to provide faster images, handle greater concurrent uploads, and if all goes well, less transcoding of supported videos.

Once the Lemmy and Pictrs versions come out we will be performing the maintenance required to update during the maintenance periods listed above. If everything goes well with lemmy.ml's rollout (see here) we'll schedule a maintenance period. (I'm eyeing off the 8th of December currently)

Closing

Reddthat is constantly seeing new members sign-up though our new application process. Since implementing applications have gone from an abysmal 40% success rate to over a 90% success.
Welcome to all these new members and maybe today will be your first post or comment!

Cheers,
Tiff
On behalf of the Reddthat Admin Team.

Hello Reddthat,

Another month has flown by. It is now "Spooky Month". That time of year where you can buy copious amounts of chocolate and not get eyed off by the checkout clerks...

Lots has been happening at Reddthat over this last month. The biggest one being the new admin team!

New Administrators

Since our last update we have welcomed 4 new Administrators to our team! You might have seen them around answering questions, or posting their regular content. Mostly we have been working behind the scenes moderating, planning and streamlining a few this that 1 person cannot do all on their own.
I'd like to say: Thank you so much for helping us all out and hope you will continue contributing your time to Reddthat.

Kbin federated issues

Most of the time of our newly appointed admins have been taken up with moderating our federated space rather than the content on reddthat! As discussed in our main post (over here) https://reddthat.com/post/6334756 . We have chosen to remove specific kbin communities where the majority of spam was coming from. This was a tough decision but an unfortunate and necessary one.

We hope that it has not caused an issue for anyone. In the future once the relevant code has been updated and kbin federates their moderation actions, we will gladly 'unblock' those communities.

Funding Update & Future Server(s)

We are currently trucking along with 2 new recurring donators in our September month, bringing us to 34 unique donators! I have updated our donation and funding post with the names of our recurring donators.

With the upcoming changes with Lemmy and Pictrs it will give us the opportunity to investigate into being highly-available, where we run 2 sets of everything on 2 separate servers. Or scale out our picture services to allow for bigger pictures, and faster upload response times. Big times ahead regardless.

Upcoming Lemmy v0.19 Breaking Changes

Acouple of serious changes are coming in v0.19 that people need to be aware of. 2FA Reset and Instance level blocking per user

All 2FA will be effectivly nuked

This is a Lemmy specific issue where two factor authentication (2FA) has been inconsistent for a while. This will allow people who have 2FA and cannot get access to their account to login again. Unfortunately if someone outthere is successfully using 2FA then you will also need to go though the setup process again.

Instance blocks for users.

YaY!

No longer do you have to wait for the admins to defederate, now you will be able to block a whole instance from appearing in your feeds and comment threads. If you don't like a specific instance, you will be able to "defederate" yourself!

How this will work on the client side (via the web or applications) I am not too certain, but it is coming!

Thankyou

Thankyou again for all our amazing users and I hope you keep enjoying your Lemmy experiences!

Cheers
Tiff,
On behalf of the Reddthat Admin Team.

Hello Reddthat,

Similar to other Lemmy instances, we're facing significant amounts of spam originating from kbin.social users, mostly in kbin.social communities, or as kbin calls them, magazines.
Unfortunately, there are currently significant issues with the moderation of this spam. While removal of spam in communities on other Lemmy instances (usually) federates to us and cleans it up, removal of spam in kbin magazines, such as those on kbin.social, is not currently properly federated to Lemmy instances.

In the last couple days, we've received an increased number of reports of spam in kbin.social magazines, of which a good chunk had already been removed on kbin.social, but these removals never federated to us.
While these reports are typically handled in a timely manner by our Reddthat Admin Team, as reports are also sent to the reporter's instance admins, we've done a more in-depth review of content in these kbin.social magazines.
Just today, we've banned and removed content from more than 50 kbin.social users, who had posted spam to kbin.social magazines within the last month.

Several other larger Lemmy instances, such as lemmy.world, lemmy.zip, and programming.dev have already decided to remove selected kbin.social magazines from their instances to deal with this.

As we also don't want to exclude interactions with other kbin users, we decided to only remove selected kbin.social magazines from Reddthat, with the intention to restore them once federation works properly.
By only removing communities with elevated spam volumes, this will not affect interactions between Lemmy users and kbin users outside of kbin magazines. kbin users are still able to participate in Reddthat and other Lemmy communities.

For now, the following kbin magazines have been removed from Reddthat:

• [!random@kbin.social](/c/random@kbin.social)
• [!internet@kbin.social](/c/internet@kbin.social)
• [!fediverse@kbin.social](/c/fediverse@kbin.social)
• [!programming@kbin.social](/c/programming@kbin.social)
• [!science@kbin.social](/c/science@kbin.social)
• [!opensource@kbin.social](/c/opensource@kbin.social)

To get an idea of the spam to legitimate content ratio, here's some screenshots of posts sorted by New:

!fediverse@kbin.social

[](https://scrot.de/img/M/e/hIpRDN7DbQ50S1ensKT1v4g1B.png)

!opensource@kbin.social

[](https://scrot.de/img/E/g/mBmHFnkDd-I7RKotU-o0YBcji.png)

All the removed by mod posts mean that the content was removed by Reddthat admins, as the removals on kbin.social did not find their way to us.

If you encounter spam, please keep reporting it, so community mods and we admins can keep Reddthat clean.

If you're interested in the technical parts, you can find the associated kbin issue on Codeberg.

Regards,
example and the Reddthat Admin Team

TLDR

Due to spam and technical issues with the federation of spam removal from kbin, we've decided to remove selected kbin.social magazines (communities) until the situation improves.

Hello Reddthat,

It has been a while since I posted a general update, so here we go!

Slight content warning regarding this post. If you don't want to read depressing things, skip to # On a lighter note.

The week of issues

If you are not aware, the last week(s) or so has been a tough one for me & all other Lemmy admins. With recent attacks of users posting CSAM, a lot of us admins have been feeling a wealth of pressure.
Starting to be familiar with the local laws surrounding our instances as well as being completely underwhelmed with the Lemmy admin tools. All of these issues are a first for Lemmy and the tools do not exist in a way that enable us to respond fast enough or in a way in which content moderation can be effective.
If it happens on another instance it still affects everyone, as it effects every fediverse instance that you federate against.

As this made "Lemmy" news it resulted in Reddthat users asking valid questions on our !community@reddthat.com. I responded with the plan I have if we end up getting targeted for CSAM. At this point in time a user chose violence upon waking up and started to antagonise me for having a plan. This user is a known Lemmy Administrator of another instance. They instigated a GDPR request for their information. While I have no issue with their GDPR instigation, I have an issue with them being antagonising, abusive, and

Alternatively, stop attracting attention you fuckhead; a spineless admin saying “I’m Batman” is exactly how you get people to mess with you

Unfortunately they chose to create multiple accounts to abuse us further. This is not conduct that is conducive for conversation nor is it conduct fitting of a Lemmy admin either. As a result we have now de-federated from the instance under the control of that admin.

To combat bot signups, we have moved to using the registration approval system. The benefit to this system not only will ensure that we can hopefully weed out the bots and people who mean to do us harm, but we can use it to put the ideals and benefits of Reddthat in the forefront of the user.
This will hopefully help them understand what is and isn't acceptable conduct while they are on Reddthat.

On a lighter note

Stability

Server stability has been fixed by our hosting provider and a benefit is that we've been migrated to newer infrastructure. What this does for our vCPU is yet to be determined but we have benefited and have confirmed our status monitoring service (over here) is working perfectly and is detecting and alerting me.

Funding

Donations on a monthly basis are now completely covering our monthly costs! I can't thank you enough for these as it really does help keep the lights on.

In August we had 4 new donators, all recurring as well! Thank you so much!

Merch / Site Redesign

I would like to offer merchandise for those who want a hoody, mouse pad, stickers, etc.
Unfortunately I am a backend person, not a graphics designer. Thus if anyone would like to make some designs please let me know in the comments below. 🧡 An example:

I am thinking we need at least 3+ design choices:

• The Logo itself (Sticker/Phone/Magnet)
• Logo with Reddthat text
• Logo with Where You've Truly 'ReddThat'!
• Something cool that you would want on a hoody. <- Very important!

I've managed to find some on-demand printing services which will allow you to purchase directly through them and have it shipped directly from a local-ish printing facilities.

The goal is to reduce the time it takes you to get your merch, reduce the costs of shipping and hopefully ensure I know as little as possible about you as I can. If all goes to plan, I won't know about your addresses / payments / etc and everyone can have some cool merch!

New Admins

To help combat the spamming issue, the increase of reports and the new approval system I am looking for some new administrators to join the team.
While I do not expect you to do everything I do, an hour or two a day in your respective timezone, which amounts to randomly opening reddthat a couple times a day. Checking in to confirm everything is still hunky-dory is probably the minimum. If you would like to apply to being an Admin to help us all out, please PM me with your approval answering the following questions:

Reason for your application:
Timezone:
Time you could allocate a day (estimate):
What you think you could bring to the team:

I am thinking we'll need about 6 admins to have full coverage around the globe and ensure that everyone will not be burnt out after a week! So even if you see a new admin pop up in the sidebar don't worry, there is always room for more!

Parting words

Thank you for those who have reached out and gave help. Thank you to the other Lemmy admins who helped me, and thank you everyone on Reddthat for still being here and enjoying our time together.

Cheers,
Tiff

tldr

• We have now defederated from our first instance :(
• Signups now are via Application process
• We had 4 new people join our recurring donations last month! 💛
• Merch is in the works. If you have some design skills please submit your designs in the comments!
• Admin recruitment drive

Update: 2023/09/02:

This has now completed. Our host too extra time to migrate everything which caused a longer downtime than expected. (it was not an offline migration rather than a live migration).

If you were around during that time, you would have seen the status page & the incidents: https://status.reddthat.com/incident/254294

Cheers

Our hardware provider had an issue with our underlying host which caused the server to be powered off.

Pictured: Our hardware host becoming aware of the threat.

Unfortunately our server was not automatically powered on afterwards, or I jumped into the control portal too fast for the automatic start to work.
After starting our server we were back up and running.

Total downtime was ~5 minutes.

Next Steps

After a brief chat with our host, they have agreed to live migrate our VPS to another host over the coming week. This may cause a 10-30 second downtime if you even notice it.

Status Page

For all status related information don't forget we have a status page over here: https://status.reddthat.com which if we have anything longer than what we had today will be were I shall keep you all informed.

Thanks all!

Tiff

P.S. Video uploads work if they are small enough, both in length and size. Any video above 10 seconds won't work. This 8 second video is about the maximum our server can sustain currently.

The things that I do while I'm meant to be sleeping is apparently break Reddthat! Sorry folks. Here's a postmortem on the issue.

What happened

I wanted a way in which I could view the metrics of our lemmy instance. This is a feature you need to turn on called Prometheus Metrics. This isn't a new thing for me, and I tackle these issues at $job daily.

After reading the documentation here on prometheus, it looks like it is a compile time-flag. Meaning the pre-build packages that are generated do not contain metric endpoints.

No worries I thought, I was already building the lemmy application and container successfully as part of getting our video support.

So I built a new container with the correct build flags, turned on my dev server again, deployed, and tested extensively.

We now have interesting metrics for easy diagnosis. Tested posting comments, as well as uploading Images as well as testing out the new Video upload!

So we've done our best and deploy to prod.

ohno.webm

As you know from the other side... it didn't go to well.

After 2 minutes of huge latencies my phone lights up with a billion notifications so I know something isn't working... Initial indications showed super high cpu usage of the Lemmy containers (the one I newly created!) That was the first minor outage / high latencies around 630-7:00 UTC and we "fixed" it by rolling back the version, confirming everything was back to normal. I went and had a bite to eat.

not_again.mp4

Fool-heartedly I attempted it again, with: clearing out build cache, directly building on the server, more testing, more builds, more testing, and more testing.

I opened up 50 terminals and basically DOS'd the (my) dev server with GET and POST requests as an attempt to trigger some form of high enough load that it would cause the testing to be validated and I'd figure out where I had gone wrong in the first place.

Nothing would trigger the issue, so I continued along with my validation and "confirmed everything was working".

Final Issue

So we are deploying to production again but we know it might not go so well so we are doing everything we can to minimise the issues.
At this point we've completely ditched our video upload patch and gone with a completely blank 0.18.4 with the metrics build flag to minimise the possible issues.

NOPE

At this point I accept the downtime and attempt to work on a solution while in fire. (I would have added the everything-is-fine meme but we've already got a few here)
Things we know:

• My lemmy app build is not actioning requests fast enough
• The error relates to a Timeout happening inside lemmy which I assumed was to postgres because there was about ~15 postgres processes in the process of performing "Authentication" (this should be INSTANT)
• postgres logs show an error with concurrency.
  • but this error doesnt happen with the dev's packaged app
• postgres isn't picking up the changes to the custom configuration
  • was this always the case?!?!?!? are all the Lemmy admins stupid? Or are we all about to have a bad time
• The docker container postgres:15-alpine now points to a new SHA! So a new release happened, and it was auto updated. ~9 days ago.

So, i fsck'd with postgres for a bit, and attempted to get it to use our customPostgresql configuration. This was the cause of the complete ~5 minute downtime. I took down everything except postgres to perform a backup because at this point I wasn't too certain what was going to be the cause of the issue.
You can never have too many backups! You don't agree, lets have a civil discussion over espressos in the comments.
I bought postgres back up with the max_connections to what it should have been (it was at the default? 100). And prayed to a deity that would alienate the least amount of people from reddthat :P

To no avail. Even with our postgres sql tuning the lemmy container I build was not performing under load as well as the developers container.

So I pretty much wasted 3 hours of my life, and reverted everything back.

Results

1. All lemmy builds are not equal. Idk what the dev's are doing but when you follow the docs one would hope to expect it to work. I'm probably missing something...
2. Postgres released a new 15-alpine docker container 9 days ago, pretty sure no-one noticed, but did it break our custom configuration? or was our custom configuration always busted? (with reference to the lemmy-ansible repo here )
3. I need a way to replay logs from our production server against our dev environment to generate the correct amount of load to catch these edge cases. (Anyone know of anything?)

At this point I'm unsure of a way forward to create the lemmy containers in a way that will perform the same as the developers ones, so instead of being one of the first instances to be able to upload video content, we might have to settle for video content when it comes. I've been chatting with the pict-rs dev, and I think we are on the same page relating to a path forward. Should be some easy wins coming in the next versions.

Final Finally

I'll be choosing stability from now on.

Tiff

Notes for other lemmy admins / me for testing later: postgres:15-alpine:

2 months ago  sha: sha256:696ffaadb338660eea62083440b46d40914b387b29fb1cb6661e060c8f576636
9 days ago sha: sha256:ab8fb914369ebea003697b7d81546c612f3e9026ac78502db79fcfee40a6d049

New UI Alternatives

After looking at our UI for a while I thought, someone will have created something special for Lemmy already. So I opened our development server, told it to get the bag rolling and investigated all the apps people have created.

Have a play around, all should be up and working. If there are other apps, ideas, or ways you think reddthat could be better please let me know!

Enjoy 😃

P.S. External UIs are a security issue

I would like to let everyone know that if you are using an external non-reddthat hosted UI (such as wefwef.app for example) you have given them access to full use of your account.

This happens because Lemmy checks for new notifications by performing GET requests via the api with the cookie in the URL field. https://instance/api/v3/user/unread_count?auth=your-authentication-cookie-here. This URL shows up in the logs of the third-party user interface. So if the third party was nefarious, they could look at their logs and get your cookie. Then they can login to your account or perform any requests.

So please only use the Reddthat user-interfaces as listed here & the main sidebar.
(If you are worried, you can log out of the thirdparty website, which will invalidate your cookie).

Tiff

https://old.reddthat.com

https://alexandrite.reddthat.com

https://photon.reddthat.com

https://voyager.reddthat.com

PS. I really like alexandrite.

Hey Reddthat,

We now have nearly 700 active accounts! I can't believe how amazing that is to me, and a whopping 24 people choosing to put their wallets on the line and donate to the Reddthat cause.

If you feel like contributing monetarily, you can over on our Reddthat OpenCollective here

Maintenance

We have how gotten to the point where our little server is no longer supporting us the best way it can. On July 28th I will turn off reddthat, take a backup and migrate us to the new server.

This new server has double the specs of our little go-getter and costs a whopping AUD$60 per month.
This will allow me to utilise the old server (current) as a development server to test all future updates, and the new server will allow us to keep our post times low, and injecting meme into our eyeballs as fast as possible.

Thanks

Thankyou all for choosing Reddthat as your federation home and a special thankyou to those who have created communities on Reddthat as well.

Tiff

Maintenance Complete!

We have now successfully migrated to our new server!

Everything went smoothly and no issues were encountered.
The longest issue was related around restoring the database as I forgot --jobs=4, so it was only restoring via one thread instead of multiple.

o/

Unfortunately we had an issue updating to the latest version of Lemmy. This caused database corruption and we had to roll back to a backup that was unfortunately from 2 days ago!

An abundance of caution in the wrong error resulted in me wanting to push this change out to help with the exploit relating to custom emoji. As other instances were attacked, I didn't want reddthat to fall to the same issue.

I am so sorry !

I have since updated our deployment scripts to automatically take a back up before all updates, as well as investigating why our cron backups didn't work as we expected them too.

We also lost all new accounts that were created over the past 2 days, all new posts, and all subscriptions. I'm very sorry about that and hope that you will reregister with those account details again, repost the memes and pictures that make our server great.

The good news is that we have updated to the latest version of Lemmy and everything is back to "normal".

Fixing Deployments

I'm going to use some of our money for a dedicated development server as our current deployment testing is clearly lacking.
Unfortunately that will have to wait until the weekend when I have some extra time to put into developing these new processes.

Tiff

Finally a user interface that fills your whole browser! As well as other bug fixes and federation fixes as well.
They also believe they might have fixed the "Hot" issues, where you randomly get super old posts in your feeds for no reason.

Yes, we were also down for ~10 minutes while I performed a backup and updated the servers as well.

Our new server has been setup and the database migration will look to happen during this week.

Cheers, Tiff

Hello Reddthatians, Reddthians, reddies? 🤷 Everyone!

If you were lucky enough to be browsing the site at around 10am UTC you might have seen a down message!

Fear not, we are now back and faster than ever. We are speed.

Images

Using Backblaze was an unfortunate mistake but one that allowed us to migrate to another object store without any issues!
We are now using Wasabi Object Storage for USD$7/month. (Which is slightly higher than the previous budgeted USD$60/year but the benefits outweigh the costs. Instead of the 180ms responses from Australia to eastern USA, we now have 0.5ms responses from Wasabi!

"You've lost me Tiff, what does this all mean?"

Well my good friend, it means picture uploads and responses are so fast you should be seeing next to 0 of those pesky red JSON popups while uploading pictures. ^[0]^

Scaling Out

We have successfully scaled out our frontend and backend applications, Lemmy-ui & Lemmy respectively. We are successfully using 2 independent applications to process traffic. This allows for Lemmy to process items concurrently. This also allows us to reduce the downtimes when pushing updates even lower. As the services will now bring 1 of the applications down, perform the updates, bring it back up and then do the same on the other ones.

Now that we have successfully tested scaling on 1 server it is time to purchase more. Which leads me into the database.

Database performance

Currently, our database performance is sub-optimal, and the reason that some of the issues with viewing content arise. Lemmy has scheduled tasks which run so it can pre-populate what is "Hot". It has to perform this query on all the posts & comments it knows about. I've been seeing deadlocks where queries start "waiting" for other queries to finish. This is especially unfortunate as this results in maxing out our underlying storage. Our little server cannot run all 3 at the same time unfortunately.

Thus the need for scaling out.

Purchase plan and Endpoint Migration

Option 1:

Purchase this beefy completely dedicated instance so we can run our database, image service, as well as multiple backend & frontend services. This will be in conjunction to running more backends & frontend on our current server. This will give us a tremendous amount of processing power, and will possibly allow for video uploads as well! ^[1]^

• $120.00AUD Monthly
• E3-1230v6 (4x 3.5 GHz Core)
• 32GB RAM
• 2x 480GB SSD
• 10TB data

(If we wanted a NVMe option, it would be $170AUD/month)

Option 2:

Purchase another VPS with our current provider and dedicate that instance to purly database related items. This would free up all the compute power to run our apps.

• $44.00AUD Monthly
• 4 Core CPU
• 16GB RAM
• 160 GB NVMe
• 8TB data

Either option I think is valid except it comes down to pricing. Our wonderful donators have currently provided us with ... checks open collective ... $557.28 AUD to work with. Which is an amazing feat! With $27 in monthly donations.

Monthly Costs:

• Object storage: $7.00USD/m (About $10.50AUD)
• Ram Upgrade: $4.50AUD/m Total Monthly Costs: $15.00AUD

So, a quick back of the math calculation will give us:

• Option 1: ~5 months before we have problems
• Option 2: ~17 months before we have problems

At this time I think a dedicated server is premature and will put a strain on a budget, knowing that in 5 months we will have a budgeting issue.
Once we have more monthly donators we can revisit purchasing a dedicated server.

I'll be monitoring server performance with the new multi-frontend/backend system over the coming days, while everyone reads this post. Then probably on the 8th/9th of July (this weekend), I will purchase the new server for a 1 month trial and start setting it up, securing it and validating our proposed system.

Thank you all for being here again! I'm loving all the new communities, new display pictures & hilarious usernames. I cannot wait to see what our little community is going to become.

Cheers,
Tiff

This is terribly hard to write. If you flushed your cache right now you would see all the newest posts without images. These are now 404s, even thought the images exist. In 2 hours everyone will see this. Unfortunately there is no going back, recovering the key store for all the "new" images.

What happened?

After the picture migration from our local file store to our object storage, i made a configuration change so that our Docker container no longer reference the internal file store. This resulted in the picture service having an internal database that was completely empty and started from scratch 😔

What makes this worse is that this was inside the ephemeral container. When the containers are recreated that data is lost. This had happened multiple times over the 2 day period.

What made this harder to debug was our CDN caching was hiding the issues, as we had a long cache time to reduce the load on our server.

The good news is that after you read this post, every picture will be correctly uploaded and added to the internal picture service database! 😊 The "better" news is the all original images from the 28th of June and before will start working again instantly.

Timeframe

The issue existed from the period from 29th of June to 1st of July.

Resolution

Right now. 1st of July 8:48 am UTC.
From now on, everything will work as expected.

Going forward

Our picture service migration has been fraught with issues and I cannot express how annoyed and disheartened by the accidents that have occurred. I am yet to have provided a service that I would be happy with.

I am very sorry that this happened and I will strive to do better! I hope you all can accept this apology

Tiff