Aotearoa / New Zealand

TL;DR; Lemmy.nz turns 1 today! Watch the video. If it doesn't work on your app, try the peertube mirror.

On 2 June 2023, Lemmy.nz was created. I've put together the linked video as a recap of the past year (it's probably clear I don't make videos for a living, but it's the thought that counts). No sound, so you'll have to play your own backing music. If you can't watch the video, the events are all covered below (and more).

Here is a bit of history, though it's not strictly in order, and others will likely have more to add (please share!).

I was first to register the domain after a bunch of Reddit controversy had people discussing Lemmy as somewhere to jump ship to. Several others commented on the first day that they had also looked to register Lemmy.nz. In the first couple of weeks we went through a period of trying to work out who we were. Users more experienced with moderation than I had warned that we need clear rules, while I had believed a server of reasonable people would know what was or wasn't acceptable. After some early Nazis came looking for a home, I was finally convinced we would need some guidance, and as a community we worked together on a compromise: We would retain our one original rule (Don't be a dick), but there would be a fleshed out Code of Conduct that underpinned it. We adopted the still current Code of Conduct on 16 June 2023.

At the time I was running Lemmy on a VPS that cost $2 per month. Within a few days of Lemmy.nz being created, hundreds of other new Lemmy instances had been created, and it was also clear that the servers would need more power to support all the people flocking to Lemmy from Reddit, which only got worse when subreddits went dark to protest. Many of the large instances moved to requiring registration applications at this point, with Lemmy.world being the main large instance keeping open registrations and so they grew to be the largest instance.

Lemmy.nz was not unique in that we also fought to keep the server online with the influx. Fediservices.nz offered to provide hosting, and so on 11 June 2024 we migrated to the new, much more powerful server. However, part of the issue was that the Lemmy software was not ready for the influx, and regular patches were released in a rush to handle the technical performance, but these rushed releases also led to a lot of bugs.

Lemmy.nz kept open registrations through that period, it was quite a while later that we were forced to move to registration application after the number spam registrations passed legitimate applications. Some servers that weren't paying attention found they had millions of new accounts created by spam bots. Luckily we only ever had a few thousand, though to this day we still receive more spam registrations than legitimate ones.

Though in the early days I had my hands full keeping things running, things stabalised with the server and Lemmy software over time. Many of the early and very active users disappeared (back to reddit?), and Lemmy as a whole started losing users, though this is a normal thing to happen after a huge influx of people coming to check out some new thing. In fact, the retention rate over Lemmy as a whole was really quite a bit higher than you'd normally expect.

We had some fun, including Terrible coffee art Wednesday, the irregular Photo Friday (and once Snapshot Saturday), and Canvas, along with our daily threads. We also had some drama with Hexbear ending in them defederating us.

We started a Matrix chat, which was very active in the early days but not so active now. Everyone is still welcome to join, though, and we can change that! Early indications from the census survey show many people don't know it exists! Check out the post here.

At one point trolls posted loads of spam to !newzealand, and luckily @idanoo@lemmy.nz was around and managed to clean it up in no time at all. To my knowledge, this is the only situation we have had like this on our local communities.

On 14 January 2024 we updated Lemmy to 19.1. This was a massive backend update that all intances were nervous about after many instances had issues with broken federation on 19.0 (we never applied that version). The update caused all login tokens to be invalid but didn't have a process to handle this, instead it showed a server error if a logged in user tried to visit the website or use an app. Some users managed to work it out in the next few days, others may have assumed Lemmy.nz was dead, never to return.

Through January and February we had various host instability issues, and after lots of work on their part (and a bunch of new hardware) things stabilised just in time for issues with federation with Lemmy.world start. It turned out that Lemmy could only send one single update at a time (say, an upvote, post, or comment), and when a server was federating something to other servers it would wait for it to be received before sending the next one. This round trip meant a limit on how many items could be sent each second, and the further the servers were from each other the smaller the number of items that could be sent. The largest Lemmy server Lemmy.world is hosted in Finland, about as far away as you can get from Lemmy.nz hosted in Auckland. We could only receive about 4 or 5 updates per second, and once Lemmy.world started creating content faster than this, we couldn't keep up. Issues with Kbin sending Lemmy.world hundreds of thousands of repeated items just exacerbated the issue, and Lemmy.nz along with others hosted nearby (like Aussie.zone) ended up not getting content from Lemmy.world until hours later, which grew to days. Lemmy.nz peaked at about 4 or 5 days behind, but I was offered help to resolve this and now we have a separate server in Finland that collects the updates from Lemmy.world and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in a batch instead of one at a time. Over time we should see a solution to this implemented by Lemmy, but for now we have a temporary solution in place.

In February, some kids in Japan started a spam bot attack on the Fediverse. This was mainly across Mastodon but Lemmy also got caught up in it. Hopefully the Lemmy.nz users didn't see much impact, as through a combination of instance admin coordination and setting up an Automod, most of the spam should have been removed pretty quickly.

In March we added the first new community we have had since the ones created in the first few days of the instance being set up. The new !rocketlab community hosts launch threads and discussion about Rocket Lab, the aerospace company founded in NZ but who later moved their headquarters to the US, though they still do many of their launches in NZ. Before adding this community we took a vote, and determined that the majority of people were happy with adding this new community but thought new communities should be added on a case by case basis. As part of the survey, we also took our first look at some basic demographics of the community.

In April, Lemmy.nz voted to enter (Tiki Taane and the CSO](https://lemmy.nz/post/8637794) in the Lemmyvision contest, and we won 5th place overall.

Over time we also added various front ends to access Lemmy.nz.

Earlier in the week I posted a census questionaire to get more detailed information about our community. Once I feel like everyone has had an opportunity to fill it in, I'll start some analysis and put together a results post. If you haven't filled it in, please do!

Through May have been back to having server issues. With all the components (lemmy's containers, automod, cache cleaner, lemmy.world batcher, and supporting components) all interacting with Lemmy internally, it has been hard to track down the issue. On top of this, the host has been having issues, which make it harder to determine where the issue is. It seems to have been better the last week or so, so here's hoping that continues.

This brings us up to today, when we are celebrating our first birthday! Feel free to contribute your memories below.