https://www.politico.eu/article/von-der-leyen-wont-rule-out-working-with-right-wing-parties/
European Commission president suggests openness to working with some right-wingers as she seeks a second term.
https://www.newsweek.com/gen-z-choosing-not-drive-1861237
Less Gen Z Americans own a driver's license than previous generations, according to consulting firm McKinsey.
https://defed.xyz/
Discover who has defederated your Fediverse instance with the Defederation Investigator.
There are a few topics about which the Based Count admin team would like to hear your thoughts as our community, before we take action. Instad of making various different posts we decided to condensate them into a single big announcement, feel free to speak your mind on any of the following topics. We encourage all Based Count users to participate, but we also welcome feedback from users of other instances.
Earlier today we have updated our instance to the new 0.19.0 version, recently released by the lemmy developers.
Because of a previously undetected bug in the code of Kaleidoscope, our custom frontend, we had to temporarily disable user flairs and replace our user interface with the latest version of the legacy lemmy-ui. Kaleidoscope and user flairs will be re-activated in the next few days, as soon as we can solve the current problem.
Furthermore, according to some feedback we have received from administrators of other instances, there might still be some bugs in the new Lemmy release and it's possible that the server will feel a bit slower, due to some changes with how federation is handled. If you encounter any errors or issues, please use this thread to report them.
A few days ago, Meta's threads.net app launched in the European Union. Simultaneously, they also started testing integration with the Fediverse through ActivityPub. This reignited old talks about whether smaller instances like ours should federate with them or not. It should be noted that threads is pursuing a closer integration with microblogging platforms like Mastodon, rather than link aggregators like Lemmy. Also, it appears that Threads posts will at first be read only to federated servers. In other words, the Fediverse will be able to read content from Threads, but not the other way around.
We are currently defederated from threads.net due to privacy concerns, but we'd be open to reconsider this stance depending on community feedback.
Another hot topic in the last few weeks was the alien.top instance and the Fediverser project. Its aim is pretty simple: creating digital bridges between Lemmy and Reddit to favour a migration of Reddit users to the Fediverse. This is mostly done by reposting Reddit posts to Lemmy lemmy communities through bots. An examples of this would be a bot reposting all content from r/PCM to our !pcm community.
Various instances have already defederated alien.top, including big players such as lemmy.world and feddit.de. What should our stance be? Would you like to see more posts in !pcm even if those posts were made by bots?
We would like to enrich our instance by adding support for different user interfaces. Because our current UI features some changes from the OG Lemmy UI, adopting new frontends would require quite a lot of work on our end, to ensure features such as our very own user flairs work seamlessly on the new design.
Because of this, for the time being only one other client would support our custom features. Vote to decide your favourite
https://www.businessinsider.com/israel-security-forces-escorted-suitcases-cash-hamas-qatar-report-2023-12
Israeli security officials would escort Qatari representatives into Gaza to deliver the cash to Hamas, the New York Times reported.
Like some of you have already noticed, the instance has been down for the last week and a half. I documented the problem and the process of bringing it back online in a thread on our Discord, so if you are curious about that I'll redirect you there.
The TL;DR is that the instance ran out of disk space, so the database crashed. No database, no Lemmy.
I solved it by moving our 30GB of images to a separate, much cheaper storage (we moved from 3,00€ / month down to just 0,02€ / month for the image storage!), freeing up a bunch of space for the database. This should keep us going for a while and allow us to scale much better in the future.
The new image host we are using, is an object storage located on a separate machnie from the Lemmy server (while previously images resided on the same server as the database and the instance). Because of this, you are likely to experience some milliseconds of delay with the loading of new images, because some back and forth between Lemmy and the image server needs to happen before you can see it (Lemmy downloads the image, sends it to the image storage, image storage returns a link to the image to Lemmy, THEN you can see the image. It takes a while).
While I'm on a roll with the Lemmy updates, later today I plan on updating our instance to version 0.18.5 of Lemmy. This should give us even more stability and better uptime in the future, but might temporarily break user flairs in !pcm@lemmy.basedcount.com.
I am terribly sorry for the prolonged downtimes and I really appreciated all the people who joined our Discord server asking if they could somehow help or simply showing care for our work on the instance.
Please remember that this is mostly a solo project of mine, where I am left handling both the server admin side as well as the community facing one. It's a lot for one guy to deal with, I'm sure you'll understand.
EDIT: I've succefully updated the instance, everything seems to be working fine. Let me know if something feels odd or buggy.
As you might have noticed, we've been experiencing repeated crashes and downtimes for the last 12 hours or so. This was because, after four long and tireless months, our storage drive had finally filled its 50GB capacity.
I noticed this today, at around 9:00 UTC and quickly took action. Fortunately we had already prepared a different partition with an additional 15GB ready for situations of this kind. It took me some additional 40 minutes of tinkering to move the database to said partition, but after that the instance was back online without any majour issues.
This is our current storage breakdown:
Secondary partition (currently: 10 GB; max capacity: 15GB)
Main partition (currently: 38GB; max capacity: 50GB)
Of these, the only ones expected to grow are the database and the image hosting, with the latter being by far the fastest growing.
In the future we are considering moving pict-rs to a separate, more cost effective storage, however for the time being this should hold. We apologize for the disservice in the last hours.
Cheers and stay Based!
This is an update on the "Why is feddit.nl defederated" post by @witchdoctor@lemmy.basedcount.com in !general@lemmy.basedcount.com.
Some time has passed and the admin appear to have gotten back control of his instance. Furthermore, I just noticed that AvaddonLFC (very active lemmy.world admin) has joined their admin team. This is more than enough for our criteria.
I have also withdrawn our censure against their instance on the Fediseer.
Here's hoping we'll be able to welcome many based Dutch people!
@Nerd02
@lemmy.basedcount.com