Ani.Social's 1st Birthday! 🥳
Today Ani.Social is officially 1 year old! It's kind of crazy that it's been a year already. I still remember the days when it was just me posting illustrations of Kurumi. Now there's nearly 1,000 of us and over 50 communities! We've been through a lot this year (defederations, federation issues, migrations, etc) but I'm happy there's a lot of support from the community and even other admins from different instances! I want to say thank you to everyone who has contributed through posts, comments, community tools, reports, funding, and more!
Ani.Social was kind of an experiment to see if hosting a public instance is something sustainable and fulfilling. After a year I can say that it is both! :D Here's to another year!
(Fun fact: We share the same birthday as Gawr Gura from Hololive EN.)
(Fun fact 2: Ani.Social was supposed to be a KBin instance. But because there was not docker container, I settled with Lemmy instead.)
Upgrade to Lemmy ~~v0.19.4~~ v0.19.5
We upgraded to ~~v0.19.4~~ v0.19.5 which brings some new features like the ability to remove stuff you uploaded through your profile page. A full list of changes may be found here. I also want to note that because sometimes upgrading Lemmy doesn't take very long, I might not make an announcement in advance anymore.
Accidental image removal
A few weeks ago, there were some images that were deleted because of a bug from a tool I used to remove old images cached from other instances. I have a long explanation here. This shouldn't happen again (hopefully!).
Verification mails did not send
For about a week in May, email was not working so some people who signed up did not receive an email. I was informed by a user who sent an email at help@ani.social. This has been resolved and anyone who did not receive a verification email can email me to have your account verified.
Random downtimes
You might notice that there are some downtime here and there. Part of this is because of small changes I make to the server (like enabling or disabling certain settings). These usually don't take long (a minute or two of downtime).
Sometimes you might see the instance gone for as long as an hour or two. This is usually caused by our hosting provider. This type of downtime is not really within my control so please bare with it. If the instance is down/inaccessible you can visit https://status.ani.social where I post updates.
Automatic moderation tools
In the near future, I plan to add automatic moderation tools (automod) such as LemmyAutomod and Fedi-safety. Both tools are likely experimental and may remove posts or images wrongly. I'll keep a close eye on them when I deploy them.
Closing thoughts -- one year in the Fediverse
A few days ago I was reading this article called "Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of FLOSS" which made a lot of interesting points on the Fediverse (duh). Theses 3, 5, and 6 are the most relevant ones in my opinion.
Thesis 3 is relevant for a lot of the political discussions and issues on defederation you see around in the Fediverse. Thesis 5 is relevant for developers, admins, and moderators as it deals with labor. Thesis 6 extends this to users.
Transitioning from corporate social media extends far past from simply "install this app and treat it like Reddit/Twitter/Instagram". It's not just a technical change for most users, it's a new social experience. The social world of the Fediverse is different from corporate social media because of how it operates differently (in policy, labor, etc). More importantly though, a lot of our practices and principles are still experimental so it's interesting to see how these are changing and developing over time (and as mentioned in the article, how these will generate new "userships").
Anyway, I suddenly feel a wave of laziness so maybe I won't write anything more than that. Feel free to read the article because there's a lot to think about.
Again, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! Thanks for reading all the way through!
Happy birthday ani.social! Thanks for putting the effort into keeping the lights on as the community here has grown.
That bit of serendipity worked out in your favor. My understanding is that kbin development has essentially stopped because of health issues with the dev. The mbin project has essentially taken up the reins as a successor still under active development.
These sound interesting, however these are admin-level tools rather than community-level. I have been saying for ages that lemmy needs more tools built in to help community moderators, but I am hopeful that they might be coming. Someday. Maybe. Hopefully? I know that sublinks is focusing a lot on this, but I haven't heard as much from the lemmy devs.
I host an instance of lemmy I use for testing, so I took a quick look through the documentation for these tools to maybe install and play around with them, but I think these might be a step beyond what I want to put the effort into getting set up. Thanks for the work that you do on this front. I wonder how the image filtering tool is going to deal with drawn content. The false positive rate might differ a lot compared to what is typical.
Yeah I did realize that LemmyAutomod's tools are admin specific. I'm also interested to see how effective fedi-safety is. It has a dry run option so I'll be able to review things and delete them myself. Thank you as well for everything you've done for this instance!