Lemmy.nz Support / Meta

Welcome back for our second financial update. See the first one here.

This quarter we added a little bit of hard drive space and 1GB of RAM but haven't been charged for it yet. As I paid for the VPS for 6 months in February, there are no further VPS charges this quarter.

Expenses for April-June 2026: $28.33

The expenses are made up of:

• VPS: $0
• Image and backup storage: $28.33

Expenses are allocated to the period they were paid, not to the period they cover. This is based on the actual amount charged to my card.

Contributions in April-June 2026: $140

We received five donations totalling $140 this quarter. Donations are based on the amount the person donated, as listed by Buy Me A Coffee (before their fees). At the end of the year I'll do a match up to try to match actual payout to donated amount to see what this difference is.

Overall position: -$177.86

• Opening balance: -$289.53
• Contributions: $140
• Expenses: -$28.33
• Total: -$177.86
• Percent of expenses paid for by contributions (this year): 55%

An update on our VPS

During the quarter we added 10GB of storage space and 1GB more RAM but otherwise the VPS seems to be sized appropriately. Last time I mentioned bandwidth usage and the potential to move away from Cloudflare. As a step towards this, I have disabled Cloudflare image caching, so all images should come via the server. This could also impact the load speed for geolocation reasons so we will see how this goes.

Donations

If you want to contribute to the cost of running Lemmy.nz, see the post here. Or the direct link: https://buymeacoffee.com/lemmynz

The usual caveat: Please don't contribute if it will impact you financially. I don't want to see anyone saying "I only had $5 in my bank account but Lemmy is important so I donated my last $5" like I've seen on other instances. If you can't afford it then don't feel bad, this round is on me. I don't mind, truly. But if you can easily chip in a few bucks a month, then it is appreciated 🙂

Pātai

As usual, feel free to ask any questions!

A week back I posted a poll for LemmyNZ users to vote for a new logo.

The results are in.

The winner was the globe by @Manticore@lemmy.nz!

Out of the LemmyNZ users, we had 8 votes for the winning entry, 2 votes for Kimmy, and 1 vote to keep the existing logo. I even made some graphs:

Pie

Bar

Hi all,

TL;DR: If you're a LemmyNZ user, go and vote for your preferred logo here:

A few weeks back there was some discussion in the weekly kōrero posts about replacing out logo. The logo was AI generated, was done using the really early tools available at that time, and was our logo before there were any users other than me. I've always hated it, and have wanted to replace it for a long time.

Of the back of that discussion, I started a vote. I underestimated how much people cared, and so cancelled the vote but learnt that people seem to like the banner (Laser kiwi).

I asked for help in this post, and one user played with some ideas for us (various versions in that post) and has come up with a cool logo with NZ the centre stage of the world. For good measure, I have kept the existing logo and the one from the previous vote in the poll.

I have also left the banner out this time. Last time I had them grouped and it wasn't clear if people liked the banner or the logo. We don't have a good suggestion to replace the banner so unless people have suggestions we can leave the laser kiwi.

The images in this vote are:

"Revenge for not being on so many world maps. Now its our turn to be the world map" by @Manticore@lemmy.nz

Kimmy the kiwi/lemmy logo hybrid, that I made and came about from the chat in the weekly kōrero:

And the existing one:

This is a vote for the logo of the LemmyNZ instance, so please only vote if your account is on LemmyNZ.

You can vote here.

Way back at the beginning, when genAI was new and LemmyNZ had but one user, our logo was created. It's terrible, it's AI generated, and I hate it.

I am keen to get a new one! There's also an option to get a new banner if that's what people want, though people have expressed that they like the current banner.

This post is to ask for people to supply their ideas for a new logo or banner. Hopefully there are some artists out there that can help! After we have some options I will organise a vote.

Reply to this post with your suggestions or your submissions.

Just a quick note to say I've updated LemmyNZ to run 0.19.19 today.

It was only just released, and only resolves security issues, so you shouldn't see any changes. Release notes here.

UPDATE: While the new logo is marginally winning, I wasn't expecting this much interest. I also regret grouping the logo and banner instead of asking separately as many people seem to like the existing laser kiwi banner. I'll try to drum up some more suggestions.

Hi all! We've had the crappy logo since LemmyNZ started, and I've had on my list to update it. With a bit of discussion in the weekly chats, I now have a proposed replacement.

Please vote on the new logo to see if we will adopt it as the LemmyNZ logo.

Vote here

Hi all,

TL;DR at bottom

Tonight I've noticed some issues loading images. Any images already proxied work fine, but new images were failing to load at all. Not sure how long it's been happening for today, but this led to a pretty shit experience browsing Lemmy 🫤

You might not be aware, but most images are run through the proxy at lemmyNZ so that when you browse, you're only loading images direct from Lemmy (other than a few exceptions, such as imgur, which blocks this and is also commonly used).

The main benefit to this is privacy. Without it, images are loaded direct from the site. This means as you scroll your feed, all those sites know you specifically (or at least your IP address) are seeing their content in your feed on Lemmy. By proxying the images, only LemmyNZ is seen as the one loading the image then it passes it on to you.

Lemmy does support only proxying thumbnails, so other sites are not called unless you click on something, but for some reason Lemmy NEVER deletes the thumbnail, and your storage just fills up and up with no way to clear it.

So tonight I've been trying to troubleshoot. I have upgraded Lemmy to the latest version (relase notes for 0.19.17 here, and 0.19.18 here. Only minor changes), updated the image version to the latest version, and restarted everything a few times. As of writing it seems ok, but I do want to know people's thoughts on this.

Do people like to have the images proxied so sites aren't tracking them? Or should we prioritise stability, where images are more likely to load consistently and have a better browsing experience if we load them from the site directly?

If the image proxy stays stable going forward, we could still consider an exception for images loaded directly from other Lemmy instances, which could reduce load a bit while still protecting from most tracking.

It's worth noting if we want to move off Cloudflare, not proxying much will likely help with speed, but we'll also be loading a lot of stuff off Cloudflare still from the other sites using it. I say it will likely help with speed because images are currently stored in an EU data centre, they load relatively quick because Cloudflare caches more locally. If we leave Cloudflare then images may have a longer delay to load.

TL;DR Image proxy in Lemmy has been unstable tonight so you might have noticed not being able to see any images. Curious on people's thoughts on continuing to use it:

1. Keep proxying as much as possible even at the expense of some failing images
2. Proxy most content but add some exceptions for content loaded direct from other Lemmy instances, and some common big image hosts
3. Proxy nothing
4. Other

Thoughts?

Hi again everyone. Off the back of this post, I have appointed two new admins to help.

Both have been around for some time and may be familiar faces to you: @terraborra@lemmy.nz and @MadPsyentist@lemmy.nz

I'm not expecting any sudden changes in anything but wanted to let everyone know.

TL;DR looking for more people to volunteer as admins for various technical and non-technical roles

Every since we moved off of the piggy-backed hosting onto our own VPS, a big concern of mine has been that I'm now a single point of failure across many parts of LemmyNZ. Unfortunately I sometimes go near busses, which makes the chances of me being hit by a bus a realistic possibility.

There are a few specific things I'd like more people involved with, which don't all necessarily require technical skills:

• Admins to help with having others available to resolve reports and monitor Matrix groups for reported issues (Lemmy has no global-level moderator role, you literally have to be an admin to remove any content posted to non-LemmyNZ communities)
• Self-hosters familiar with docker compose to help with hands on server management stuff
• Help with setting up some other content, such as a join.lemmy.nz page to help with user on-boarding and perhaps other helpful instructions for users
• Help from someone with art skills to replace that shitty green logo we've had since day one

If others have suggestions on picking people, I'm happy to take input. To be considered for roles with elevated permission, I think you should meet the following criteria:

• Must be a LemmyNZ user and have a history as a LemmyNZ user - not a newly joined account
• Must not be a controversial decision to grant the user this special access. The average LemmyNZ user should not be concerned with the user being appointed.
• Must be an active user. To fill a gap we need people who are generally around on Lemmy. This doesn't necessarily mean they have to be posting or commenting, but there should be enough of a trail to gauge a user's controversial-ness.
• Must use the chat platform Matrix - you don't need a history of using it but Lemmy runs on a collaboration between instances, and this collaboration happens across a range of Matrix chats. Therefore we need people willing to collaborate on Matrix and also monitor the admin chats.

If you're interested in helping and think you fit the criteria, reply below. Also feel free to tag other users if you think they would be a good fit, but no one is obligated to do anything. Please message me if you have concerns about any users in particular.

For all users, note that email addresses are visible to admins who know where to look, which will include any newly appointed admins. If you're concerned with this, you can change your email address or remove it before other admins are appointed. You can also freely use a relay email service that forwards emails to your main email address, such as SimpleLogin, Firefox Relay, or AnonAddy. Some level of IP logging is also done by Lemmy, you're free to use a VPN.

Hi all, this is (I think) the first Lemmy.nz financial update! In case you missed it, we are no longer piggybacking on someone else's hosting and now have our own virtual server.

Now that we have to pay our own way, I am going to start doing semi-regular updates about how things are going. I am thinking quarterly updates.

This quarter we have migrated to a new VPS and moved images to object storage, each of which has an ongoing cost. Other potential costs are email sending (which to date I don't believe we have ever crossed over the free sending threshold for Mailgun) and the domain registration, which is already paid up for a couple of years.

Expenses for January-March 2026: $369.53

The expenses are made up of:

• VPS: $358.10
• Image and backup storage: $11.43

Expenses are allocated to the period they were paid, not to the period they cover. The VPS expense covers the first month, plus a further 6 months, which makes this look a lot more expensive than it should. The image and backup storage only includes a partial month for February and does not include March as March will be billed in April based on usage.

Contributions in January-March 2026: $35

We received two donations totalling $35 this quarter.

Overall position: -$289.53

This ending balance is mostly because I have paid for hosting 6 months in advance. I started collecting donations late last year, and we had $45 donated, so we actually started with $45 at the start of the quarter.

• Opening balance: $45
• Contributions: $35
• Expenses: -$369.53
• Total: -$289.53
• Percent of expenses paid for by contributions: 21%

An update on our move to the VPS

We have now had over a month on the VPS. The specs we have seem to be appropriate with RAM constantly at 80% use, the CPU peaks at an occasional 90% but averaging around 40%, and the hard drive storage at about 83% which may need a little more space soon, adding another dollar or two a month.

In March we cut it pretty close on bandwidth usage as I am using a new backup tool and didn't have compression set up right initially, which burnt through a lot of data in the first week. So I have been carefully rationing what is used for offsite transfer to keep us within the 1TB allocation for this month, however, it does feel like we could move away from Cloudflare's caching and still be within the 1TB in the future. I will let it run all April and see what sort of usage we have.

Donations

If you want to contribute to the cost of running Lemmy.nz, see the post here.

The usual caveat: Please don't contribute if it will impact you financially. I don't want to see anyone saying "I only had $5 in my bank account but Lemmy is important so I donated my last $5" like I've seen on other instances. If you can't afford it then don't feel bad, this round is on me. I don't mind, truly. But if you can easily chip in a few bucks a month, then it is appreciated 🙂

Pātai

As usual, feel free to ask any questions!

Two weeks ago we moved to a new VPS, less powerful than the previous server but we have to pay now so it is what it is.

We also recently implemented Anubis, which should have cut the amount of processing power wasted on AI scraper bots.

I'm interested in knowing how people have found it.

Is it feeling sluggish or similar to the last server?

Images are now in object storage instead of on the hard drive, do you notice a difference in loading speed?

Is anyone still having trouble with Anubis and getting stuck on the success screen or have those issues all been resolved?

Any other feedback on the new setup?

Earlier in the series:

• We are losing our host and will need to move to a VPS.
• We moved to object storage for images over last weekend.
• On Friday we moved to the new host

TL;DR of this post: We now have Anubis on Lemmy.nz, which helps protect against scrapers.

Hi everyone! As some have noticed, the site has been slow these past few days, which was due to a massive amount of traffic presumed to be from AI scraping bots training LLMs. I posted this elsewhere but will put it here again for good measure (7 day history):

Yeah so that peak of the graph is over 2 million unique requests that day, and the earlier part of the week has about 100k a day. So a 20x increase in traffic.

You may have also seen some weird stuff over this weekend as I played with how to get Anubis inserted into our Lemmy setup, which wasn't too straightforward with our multitude of frontends and our load balanced Lemmy-UI. You might have seen errors, apps might not have been able to load due to being incorrectly blocked, or you might not have been able to load the site at all. Apologies for this, but I think I have it sorted now.

Running under the assumption that the scrapers are not directly targeting Lemmy but are just scraping everything on the net and we just happen to have a significant amount of content, Anubis has been added only to the front ends (websites you see accessing in a browser), and if you are logged in then the policies are set so Anubis should just pass you straight through without any checks.

The APIs and federation and anything else happening directly with the backend do not go through Anubis. This means apps should not be affected and loading images should not be affected.

I've already noticed a big difference in CPU usage. It went from periods of time averaging over 150% (as in, the CPU couldn't keep up, and you'd see Lemmy fail to load at these times), to the last hour peaking at 47% and mostly hovering around 15-25% CPU usage.

Click for image of last 24 hours CPU usage

Adding Anubis is a pretty big change that has a decent chance of breaking something so please let me know if you see anything weird!

I'm also happy to give more technical info if anyone wants to know about how it's implemented, the architecture of our Lemmy setup and how it fits in, or anything else. Just ask!

Earlier in the series:

• I have an update in this post. TL;DR we are losing our host and will need to move to a VPS.
• We moved to object storage for images over last weekend.

TL;DR of this post:

• We will move to a new VPS this weekend
• Lemmy.nz will be down (properly down) from sometime after 7:30PM Friday until the job is done. This should be completed within a few hours but I reserve the right to use Saturday as well 🙂
• Initial estimates are that the VPS will be around NZD $50/mo, on top of image storage costs (hard to guess - perhaps $10/mo)

I have now confirmed a plan with a VPS host Zappie, in their Auckland data centre. This is in fact the same place the existing server is colocated.

The specs of the new VPS:

CPU: 4 Cores Ram: 8GB Disk: 150GB Monthly Traffic: 1TB

We may need to adjust things as we go. Initially I will keep our current setup (including Cloudflare), but as we understand better what our needs are I am keen to move off Cloudflare as there was quite a lot of support for that move.

I have copied things across to test and it runs Lemmy well, similar to the current server, though that's without users, federation, and rogue AI scrapers but Zappie can bump specs pretty quick if needed.

Please let me know if you have any questions, I'm always happy to provide more details 🙂

In case you missed it, images have been down for the night while I did a migration from the hard drive storage to object storage.

The migration is now complete! Please let me know if you find anything odd with images.

In case you missed it, I have an update in this post. TL;DR we are losing our host and will need to move to a VPS.

It seems pretty clear that once we have to start paying for storage, it will be very expensive to keep everything on hard drive storage, so we will need to move to storing images on object storage.

Unless anyone has any objections, instead of doing everything in one go, I would like to do the migration to object storage for images in advance of the main move to a VPS in order to better assess what we will need for storage once that part has been offloaded. The plan is to use Backblaze B2 storage, because it's cheap, reliable, and already used for our backups.

This means we will need two patches of downtime, most likely this weekend and next as we need to be off the current host by the end of the month.

This post is to propose an outage from this Friday after 8pm, through to whenever it is finished on Saturday. I have been doing some testing, and it seems it will be a bit flaky if I try to do the migration too fast. My plan is to set it going the night before, run it overnight, and start Lemmy back up in the morning assuming the migration has finished by then. But there is every chance that it just stops while I'm sleeping and needs to be restarted in the morning, taking most of Saturday.

My current plan is to keep Lemmy itself running during this time, meaning there will be no images but federation will continue so we shouldn't need to catch up after it's done.

TL;DR

• Outage Friday after 8pm through to when it's done on Saturday
• Most likely Lemmy text content will remain available but no guarantees
• Moving image storage to Backblaze B2 - please tell me ASAP if there are objections (American company, but only real alternatives are Cloudflare or big tech and American anyway)
• A further outage will be required the following weekend to move the actual Lemmy service

As many of you will know, we have been borrowing server hosting, which kept costs very minimal. Many of you donated to the host (thanks!), but a while back they stopped taking donations as they wound down operations including transferring mastodon.nz to new people and gave me notice that we would eventually need to move to other hosting.

That was quite some time back, and now I've been notified that the time has finally come. At some point in this month we will swap over to a new host. It will also involve significantly increased costs to run the server (up from almost nothing), and most likely we will move to a VPS off of the current shared but dedicated hardware to more appropriate specs, and move to using object storage for images. All this will likely require some down time, which I will try to give notice of. I'm currently planning for this to be quite significant (perhaps done over the course of a whole weekend), since this would involve migrating all images to object storage which must be done with pict-rs shut down (others have reported 8+ hours for this), as well as transferring all other data to a new VPS, then a slow period of time as it catches up on federation. The second day would be a backup in case something went wrong.

When this move happens, I'll also start to do regular financial updates. In the past people have been interested in running costs, but they have been minimal out of pocket due to the server hosting being free to me. With the increased costs it makes sense to start regular updates about what it costs to run the instance, similar to what other instances do. There is a very wide range in what this could cost, and it's not clear right now what the lowest spec server is that we could get away with. But I am hoping we can keep this under $50 a month. People have asked previously about donations, a little while back I set up a page so you could donate directly to Lemmy.nz, here is the post about it (with the emphasis on not donating if it will materially impact you): https://lemmy.nz/post/21494039

Before moving forward, I'd like some input from Lemmy.nz users on some specific questions:

Currently we are hosted in NZ, how important is it to continue this? (with cost being the main barrier)

We will try to host in NZ if we can, but if cost becomes an issue, is it a big deal to host in Australia or elsewhere? We will want to try to stay close to NZ so NZ based users have low latency

Do people object to Cloudflare?

Currently we use Cloudflare, with benefits around loading faster for people in other countries (due to the CDN) and the ability to more easily handle AI scrapers.

Cloudflare puts us in the power of a large company and reduces our independence, but it also reduces bandwidth usage and have tools to more easily fight AI scrapers that cripple the server. Cloudflare offers captcha services that help this.

Remember, users on other instances that don't proxy images will also be loading images directly from our servers, which Cloudflare will reduce the latency of due to their CDN.

If people object to Cloudflare, I am willing to attempt to avoid using it, adding Anubus and managing IP blocklists, but it will be more work. It will also be a slightly higher cost, as we will need a higher traffic allocation since Cloudflare currently caches a lot of image traffic.

Pātai?

If you have any questions, let me know!

Earlier today I updated Lemmy.nz to Lemmy 0.19.15

Previously we werre running 0.19.13 so there are two versions updated.

Release notes for 0.19.14.

Release notes for 0.19.15.

Only minor changes. The main things seem to be:

• Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions. The new release fixes these problems.
• Pages are now capped to 100, as in you can only go 100 pages of content clicking "Next" on the website, and the equivalent number of posts on apps. This is to reduce the risk of DDOS attacks.

The 0.19.15 release notes also mention Lemmy version 1.0 is coming soon and include a list of new features.

Hello Dave,

Sorry for bothering you again.

There is an issue with lemmy.world again

I only see one vote in this post https://lemmy.nz/post/30741653

Thanks for your time

Hello Dave,

It seems there is an issue with lemmy.world. Votes and comments are delayed, for an example this post: https://lemmy.nz/post/30741653.

I think this has been happening since yesterday, and I only realized it today.

Sorry about the down time, Lemmy.nz was just down for 30 mins.

I wish I had more info but I'm not sure what the issue was!

It seems our instance started getting hit hard about 5am, then we were at 100% CPU for the last 30 mins:

The number of hits has shot up too:

In case you're thinking well of course an NZ site has many more hits in daylight hours, here's the week:

I'm guessing AI scrapers?

Reposting this due to a grand total of zero votes from Lemmy.nz users...

It's been noticed that there is no Maps without NZ community on Lemmy. There's a short conversation here that suggests it's added on Lemmy.nz

Please vote in the linked survey. Lemmy.nz users only please 🙂 ^___^

Survey here: https://survey.lemmy.nz/index.php/892864

It's been noticed that there is no Maps without NZ community on Lemmy. There's a short conversation here that suggests it's added on Lemmy.nz

Please vote in the linked survey. Lemmy.nz users only please 🙂

We just had about 2 hours of downtime, sorry about that. It was an issue at the host end.

We borrow hosting, and the host had to make a trip into the data centre to get things going again.

With a length of downtime like this there will be a period of time while federation catches up, so expect some amount of delay with getting content from other servers.

Apologies for the bit of downtime. I’ve just updated Lemmy.nz to 0.19.12 as well as updating pict-rs which handles images.

We have upgraded two Lemmy versions (previously we were on 0.19.10, now we are on 0.19.12).

The first is 0.19.11. The release notes are here.

For 0.19.12, the release notes are here.

Some changes:

• The Lemmy developers added a donation dialogue for donating to them.
• When registration applications are approved (or denied), you will now get an email (yay!)
• Various accessibility changes and a new theme originally used on the instance Rblind.com

There are also heaps of minor changes mentioned in the release notes linked above.

Please let me know if you find anything not working right!