We decided to not host any sort of Buy-Sell-Trade community on our hobby instance for this reason. It’s a small community so a lot of people know usernames of people they know and can trust. It’s very easy for a scammer to use someone’s username and say “I’ll sell you that thing! Send me $150!”.
Oh that’s cool. I was right, only 9 monthly users.
We run on the cheapest Hetzner VPS we can, which is about $8 USD/month. Pictrs are on cloudflare R2. Pictrs storage hovers around 14GB and we have yet to get a non-zero invoice.
Our active users are super low (I think). I don’t think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance, just for communities, but since it’s a niche instance I can safely say it’s around 10 people.
So that’s a little less than a dollar per month per user. On the existing VPS I think we could safely add a bunch of users without needing to upgrade.
Ah, interesting. That experience combined with the wording of “this update requires postgres 16”, I can see where the confusion comes from.
Interestingly enough, they fixed the documentation. Now it says “We recommend upgrading to PostgreSQL 16 due to a known memory leak in PSQL 15. To use the new image proxy feature, pict-rs version 0.5+ is required.” https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4_-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements
My understanding is that postgres doesn’t need to be upgraded. It’ll still work with version 15 or whatever you have. Postgres 15 has some sort of memory leak that they’re trying to get away from, so they made 16 the new default.
Same with the “requirement” to upgrade pict-rs to the latest version. You can keep the old version if you don’t care about the new image proxy feature.
Really it’s a not a problem of needing to upgrade this stuff, but a problem with the documentation which isn’t clear. That’s a big weak spot for the Lemmy project in my opinion. I only learned the above information from lurking a bit in the Matrix chat.
I wonder why they are still on 0.18.4. The latest Lemmy version is 0.19.5 and it has some nice features compared to 0.18.x.
“Easy” might just be relevant to your experience. You can follow along with the Ansible instructions, or go your own way with Docker and Docker Compose.
Both methods require a bit of work to get spun up, but it’s not too bad.
The upgrade went smoothly for me. Be smart with your backups with this one!
Upgrading to postgres 16 was the hardest part. You need to pg_dump the lemmy database, upgrade to postgres 16 (which will complain in the logs that the current data isn’t compatible), delete the database folder (don’t delete the backup file from pg_dump!), then import the backup file into postgres 16.
I had already upgraded pict-rs to version 0.5+ so that was easy.
Then I compared the new lemmy.hjson with what I already had to get the new pict-rs setting for proxied images (turned off for now).
Overall a lot more complex than previous upgrades.
Be smart with your backups with this one!
One more thing to consider if you’re using Debian 12 is it comes with postgres 15, so if you you’re using the bare metal to make backups, you’ll need to install postgres 16 using the instructions here.
Blocking spam is not selfish, no.
Isn’t that good enough?
A week ago someone commented on my 9 year old reddit post.
I was worried that federation was still broken after not seeing any comments on this after 3 hours… But it’s working.
No problems so far on our instance. Thanks for the update and bug fixes.
Oh gotcha. I’d suppose that if a person is that concerned with Threads, they’re probably invested in the idea of Lemmy such that transferring to another instance is not out of the question. Someone who’s not interested in putting in the effort to transfer probably doesn’t feel strongly either way about Threads. That’s just an assumption on my part, of course.
I don’t think the world admins really care if users transfer away. That’s just federation in action. Good stuff.
I’m going to set up a cronjob to restart the Lemmy docker container every 6 hours. That seems to be around when stuff stops working usually.
v0.19.0 has a giant federation bug. My instance hasn’t updated, either.
I agree.
How are you installing the docker image? You can downgrade to the stable version.
Sync still works for me, connecting to a non-beta instance.
Block lemmy.ml and hexbear to start. I find their users to be quite toxic.