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

I'm super excited at the prospect of getting a nice dog park in mount pleasant, it's sorely needed.

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!

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

Enjoy!

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:

I don't know how I missed this when it came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoner_Cats

Stoner Cats is a cartoon that stars Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Chris Rock as cats that use medical marijuana.[1] The show also stars Jane Fonda, Seth MacFarlane, and Vitalik Buterin with guests Dax Shepard, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Michael Bublé. The producers were fined by the US Securities and Exchange Commission because they sold unregistered NFTs as a means towards a pass to view the show