Instance birthday
On 2 June we will celebrate 1 year of lemmy.nz! Anyone got ideas on how to celebrate?
this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Aotearoa / New Zealand
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Woah, can't believe it's been an year already!
For the anniversary day, maybe we could have a post showcasing a few highlights of our community over the past year, something like Spotify's Wrapped, but for Lemmy - so maybe a highlight of the most upvoted posts/comments, most profilic posters, membership counts, major server changes and little victories (maybe share some of your experiences in keeping the ship afloat)?
Nice idea! Any thoughts on presentation? A post with info, links, and screen shots would probably be easiest, but maybe we can do better?
I'll try to think of some major things that have happened in the last year.
Looking back through old posts I'm feeling sad about all the cool people who have slowly dropped off over the year. But also all the ones who are still here so that's cool!
If you want to make it fancy we could do a presentation type thing, like via slidesgo.com or similar, but since this is on/for Lemmy, I think we should just keep it simple and make it a normal post.
Hmm, maybe a combination of a post and video? I'll see if I can work out how to make a video. Show some stuff from the past year, some graphs, etc.
Weird. My account is already showing 1 year.
Guessing voyager must be rounding somehow.
Mine says that too, on Lemmy-UI. Probably just switches to 1 yr when it gets close. 1 year (ish).
Hi all, sorry for being a bit slow on creating this new thread.
I have a few updates but I'll post them in separate comments so they have separate comment chains.
Census
I'm working on a census survey like lemmy.ca did here. I didn't have access to the original survey questions but I'm trying to align with their survey so we can compare against it. Though not everything is relevant so some things will be a bit different. I'm planning on doing this some time around the instance birthday at the start of June, and repeating it each year as Lemmy.ca does.
Anyone want to participate in helping refine it?
No volunteers to review the census questionnaire?
Any questions that anyone is particularly interested in asking the community?
Work is a little surreal today. I'm at one of the ministries and today is the last day of pretty much everyone who took voluntary redundancy. The farewell morning teas are sequentially occupying the kitchen areas.
I have heard this can be hardest on those left behind. People feel a form of survivor's guilt, while most of the ones that took the voluntary redundancy are happy to be going.
I don't know about guilt but I can confirm their work did not leave with them.
Don't worry, I'm sure they will double your salary to compensate for your doubled workload.
Down time
I've been fighting with lemmy a bit recently, it's going down randomly and I'm not sure why. I have started disabling things to see if I can isolate it. The main one you might notice missing is the automod that handles spam, so if you see spam please report it and I'll handle it manually.
It keeps timing out on me. It's sporatic but more frequent than I would expect.
Yeah, I have a tracker (Uptime Kuma) that's testing every minute. There has been failures or time outs every day for the last week or so, but it was much better before that. I'm not sure what's changed that's caused the issue.
There have been 6 separate outages today, and it needs two checks in a row to fail to count it as an outage. Though most have only been a few minutes.
If anyone has suggestions on how to troubleshoot, I'm listening!
What are you tracking? Where are you hosting? What kind of monitoring do you have in place?
Just tracking HTTP status of lemmy.nz. Host is in an Auckland datacenter, but I don't control it, it's hosted by the guys at fediservices.nz. Monitoring is minimal, other than the up/down I've gotta dive into logs.
I would start by setting up some sort of a monitoring system that tracks your memory usage, disk I/O, CPU etc. There are many packages out there for that. I don't know what lemmy is written in but chances are there are also application monitoring you can wire in too like Sentry https://sentry.io/welcome/
Of course I don't know how your app is being hosted by fediservices. I don't know if you have shell access or can install any apps or whatever.
Oh sorry, should have mentioned they have it hosted on proxmox and I have access to view the dashboard. I can see the resource usage you mentioned including history.
I have access to and full control over the proxmox container, but don't have any specific monitoring outside of the logging.
Unfortunately neither the resource usage nor the logs have given away anything. Resource usage is often all over the place. CPU spikes are common and always have been, and whenever there is downtime it's followed by a resource spike as federation catches up. Plus, federation is pretty random, especially when kbin fires a bunch of stuff at lemmy.world and messes everyone up.
Over the course of today I've done a lot of log reading, and I have identified one possible problem and made a tweak tonight. Time will tell if it helps.
Today was also particularly rocky as the host had various spots of downtime, mixed in with lemmy being down at times. I'll keep monitoring tomorrow and see if it's better, today was particularly bad.
If the federation is done by a helper app then it may be possible to throttle it. At least it wouldn't choke out the machine and slow down other running processes.
The federation doesn't generally seem to be a problem, but many of the large instances do run inbound federation in a separate container.
My problem has been that I haven't managed to narrow it down to a component, so splitting out the containers may not help me troubleshoot. It's definitely on my list of things to try though, if I don't manage to narrow it down.
Currently we have had a run of 5 hours with no outages! So we are doing much better than yesterday. But I suspect that's probably just the host solving their issues.
Maybe the host was the problem in the first place!
To my knowledge, the host issues were only yesterday. The problems over the week or more before that were probably not a problem with the host. But now those are solved I can get back to trying to solve the original issue 😅
Sorry guys, today we have the double whammy of the host having issues as well as lemmy itself having issues, so it's all a bit flaky today.
How come nobody is reporting on covid anymore? From what I understand there has been a serious spike in cases over the last couple of weeks.
My wife got her flu jab earlier this week and the nurse recommended her to get a COVID booster if she can because cases are spiking again apparently. I think the general public doesn't care as much any more
I was under the impression that our vaccines have not been updated and are not very useful against the latest variants.
I don’t really know. I’m guilty too of not following any of the Covid news haha
It's probably not news anymore. No one is reading articles about it, so they don't publish the stories.
In Wellington there's this flu study that also tracks COVID, but they have only just started tracking the 2024 flu season. Still, there's a substantial number of COVID cases. In the past the most recent week has always been inaccurate as they are still waiting for the results of some testing to come through, so ignore that as it's probably not actually a drop (based on the other axis we should see it higher than the first week's results).
Given the lack of rigorous testing and monitoring I suspect actual reported number of cases should be doubled or tripled. The hospitalisation and deaths are more reliable and that's what we should be monitoring.
In terms of MOH reporting, absolutely. Triple is probably still underestimating. You're right about hospitalisations and deaths, data is much better when we don't rely on people self-reporting. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find the right data (though I didn't try particularly hard).
The graph I posted about is from a flu study, the numbers should be very reliable, just affected by the small sample size (from my rough calculations based on the graph, about 1,300 participants). From the graph it looks like about 20/80 confirmed cases, so 20/1300. With a very rough 400,000 people in the Wellington region, that's 6,000 people with COVID in Wellington alone.
Have to say I love when stuff gets shipped with DHL. Practically overnight shipping from Australia. I know it costs more but so worth it sometimes.
Between them, DHL and FedEx get almost all of our parts orders from Melbourne to Pukekohe overnight. They are unbelievably efficient compared to outfits places like Toll or Aramex that can't get packages across Auckland in under a week.
Do FedEx have their own drivers in Auckland? IIRC they get handed over to Nz Couriers here in Hamilton, who I find aren’t as reliable as the DHL drivers.
It’s usually too expensive for me but occasionally I stump up for it, as I find Auspost to be really slow, which most sites use when sending here from Oz.
FedEx have their own drivers in Auckland?
I can confirm that they have at least one.
To be fair though, our supplier invests a fairly large chunk of money in freight, and in the past ran their own dedicated flights when the previous carrier (maybe TNT? Can't remember) wasn't reliable enough. I have no idea if FedEx is that good in general or if it's only for these sort of high-priority customers.