@maiion
@chat.maiion.comA few weeks passed since my last update, but MaiionChat is now upgraded to Lemmy instance v0.18.3. The upgrade was quick and seamless in the virtual environment with a smaller test database. As expected, the upgrade for the live site was also quick. Aside from the server's CPU resources maxing out processing the much larger postgres database for only the first 3 minutes, everything else was also seamless. The server continues to run as usual, and utilizes slightly less memory compared to previous versions. Release information can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.3
For the sake of transparency, I would like to mention the customizations and additions I made to the instance leading to the v0.18.3 upgrade.
There was a time when this instance did not have picture previews or open graph images (og:image). This was a decision I made initially to prevent the server's space from running out. Aside from the occasional image links, the text only experience got old. Due to that, I enabled image previews on July 14th, and monitored the server usage until July 21st.
During that time, I found out that it took 3 days for the "pictrs" folder to match the size of the "postgres" database folder. At the rate the "pictrs" folder was growing, the server would have no more room after a few months. I did not want to disable picture previews, so I just made a bash script that deletes all pictures after 2 days and runs via cron schedule. If you go to any local community, and go to posts older than 2 days, you will see that most, if not all picture previews are gone.
Still on the topic of pictures, I noticed that activating picture previews added more traffic to this instance. Trying to take advantage of the opportunity, I did a little bit of promotion on another instance, and community subscriptions significantly increased despite the lack of comments on my post. However, my promotion introduced a few trolls who created accounts to deliberately break rule 4 and posted NSFW content. I decided to ban the accounts instead of purging them from the database like I did with the wave of bot accounts from a while ago. The NSFW content that were deliberately posted in the wrong communities were completely purged from the database.
On the topic of the database, I previously learned in an older post that the activity table consumes plenty of server space. What I did in that older post was manual. Since then, I have cleaned the database automatically with another bash script that runs via cron schedule. The bash script will clean the activity table of content older than 1 day every day. Upon setting this, I noticed that if you view the "All" feed and filter by "Active", most of the oldest content will be from 2 days ago. Before this, the "Active" filter had content as old as 1 week. Now, the "Active" filter seems to show the active content up to 2 days.
Please be aware that all these changes were made under v0.18.2
Lastly, since community subscriptions are increasing, I have made the bot, u/QualityControl, a moderator for all the communities. The source code of this bot can be found here: https://github.com/Dakkaron/SquareModBot. I have it filtering unwanted links to Reddit, and I will expand the filter as needed.
My apologies if any of these changes will potentially or have already caused inconveniences to lurkers and existing users.
Edit: Spelling & Grammar
https://chat.maiion.com/
[07/14/2023] Reverted back and running v0.18.2 with no problems for the past day. I simply deleted everything pertaining to v0.18.2 while on v0.18.2-rc.2, and then reinstalled v0.18.2. Everything now should be at the latest version at the time of writing this.
Original Title: [07/12/2023] Downgraded From v0.18.2 back to v0.18.2-rc.2
Out of the recent list of issues found in Lemmy's GitHub, this one stood out to me https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3588 because it talks about federation problems with comments. For this instance, I noticed that we were not federating at all on v0.18.2 and that if I were to subscribe to a community, it would remain pending no matter how many times I refreshed the page. To figure out what happened, I immediately went to view the server's logs for Lemmy. It was 1.2GB when I first saw it and grew about 16MB every few minutes.
I immediately knew something was wrong. Before opening it, I compressed it and downloaded it off the server to view it on my local device. With more lines in the file than I could go through, the logs did indicate there were errors sending requests to every other instance and communities. There was no personally identifiable information in that log file, and I deleted it completely on both the server and on my local device.
Initially, I thought the problems were due to trying to set up Tor for the Lemmy instance, but the timing of the posts and the log files point to the approximate time I upgraded to v0.18.2. After downgrading to v0.18.2-rc.2, the seemingly static All page with local content was instantly filled with the latest content from other instances. After truncating the logs, it grew to only 7MB after almost an hour. I was also able to "join" the communities that were formerly in the pending state. I will keep this instance on Lemmy v0.18.2-rc.2 until I can learn more.
In the meantime, federation is restored and MaiionChat is accessible over the Tor Network! The link will be at the bottom of the homepage sidebar on https://chat.maiion.com
Edit: Grammar & Updates
The URL is linked in this post. The link will also be on the homepage sidebar.
maiion33jgwybulqceh6a4mum2c4xuoh2rovvwvtcys565zlbc7litqd.onion
In light of the recent exploits, I decided to update this instance's security headers. I am in no way affiliated with the following site, but the grade of my instance's security headers can be viewed here: https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fchat.maiion.com&hide=on&followRedirects=on - Feel free to check other Lemmy instances and sites.
Per this post there was nothing in the custom_emoji_keyword and custom_emoji postgresql tables for me to delete. The image is below.
What I did delete in the database were the contents of the activity table older than 2 days. According to the developers, the "activity table...is basically a duplicate of the data in the main tables, and not necessary. It needs to be periodically cleared of data older than maybe 2 weeks or a month". However, the developers "went with deleting activities older than 6 months".
In an effort to reduce server disk usage, I was able to reduce the 3GB activity table to just under 1GB.
Before
After
Lastly, I updated lemmy-ui to v0.18.2-rc.2 which should address the exploits that happened on other Lemmy instances. The release page can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/releases/tag/0.18.2-rc.2
Knowing that "Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence", "Facebook Spreads Fake News Faster Than Any Other Social Website", and that at least "10 Other Facebook Experiments On Users" were conducted, MaiionChat will block Threads due to the company's history violating MaiionChat's instance rules 3 and 5. We are here because we are trying to make and support something better.
In addition to the reasons above, privacy is very important to us here. We believe that Facebook/Meta, Instagram, and now Threads among other tech giants, have questionable privacy practices. In light of the permissions requested by Facebook discussed from this post and the personal data that may be collected by Threads, MaiionChat believes there is sufficient information available to deduce that Threads plans to violate instance rule 2. As far as this article is concerned, an "invasion of privacy" can be classified as a type of harassment.
On another point, we believe there is good reason to be concerned about the harms Embrace, extend, and extinguish could do to the Fediverse. Threads is currently on the Embrace stage:
“Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @mosseri@threads.net.” Mosseri also noted that the team building Threads wasn’t able to complete the work to support fediverse at launch. “We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said. -Source
To conclude before this gets any longer, MaiionChat will join the list of Lemmy and Mastodon instances blocking Threads.
On a more personal note, I would like to thank the Lemmy developers and contributors for making all of this possible. I wish to report that this instance is now running on v0.18.1. Details of this release can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases. I would also like to apologize for the down time earlier this afternoon if it interfered with anyone using this instance.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.1-rc.10
Version 0.18.1-rc.10
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.1-rc.4
Version 0.18.1-rc.4
For release information: