1
 
 

Howdy partners,

Interested in helping out?

We’re opening applications for a couple of volunteer admin roles for our DotZip platforms, covering Lemmy.zip, Piefed.zip and Mastodon.zip.

We're looking for both technical admins and community admins. If you’ve ever wanted to help shape the direction of the instance, support the community, or get involved behind the scenes, now’s a great time.

These roles are voluntary and flexible; what matters most is enthusiasm, reliability, and a genuine interest in helping keep .zip services running smoothly and welcoming for everyone.

There is a small barrier to entry - you must be active on one of our platforms and have been active for at least 2 months.


Technical Admins 🔧

You don’t need to be an expert, but if you have experience (or interest!) in things like Linux, Docker, Nginx, Cloudflare, activitypub & federation issues, or general debugging, we’d love to hear from you. We’re especially looking for people who enjoy problem-solving and keeping services running reliably.


Community Admins 🛡️

If you care about healthy discussion, fair moderation, community safety, and helping set the tone for the instance, you could be a great fit.

We welcome thoughtful, level-headed people who communicate well and can handle tricky situations calmly.


How to apply 📝

Just fill out the application form here: Application Form

Please answer honestly. We’re not expecting perfection or complete knowledge of everything. We mainly want to understand your approach, your values, and what you’d feel comfortable contributing.


Thank You ❤️

DotZip only exists because of the fantastic community, and we’re genuinely excited to bring a few more people into the team who want to help keep it a fun and thriving place.

If you have any questions before applying, feel free to comment below or message me directly!

Thanks

Demigodrick

2
 
 

Welcome!

Welcome to Lemmy.zip

About Lemmy

Lemmy is a federated social link aggregation and discussion platform. It’s being developed by the Lemmy devs

About Federation

What does federation mean?

It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact with each other.

Think of it a bit like email - you send a message from your gmail account to your friend's outlook account. You're on different servers, but all your messages are shared between you both.

  • You can search and view communities on remote servers from here
  • You can create posts in remote communities
  • You can respond to remote posts
  • You will be notified (if you wish) of comments on your remote posts
  • You can follow Lemmy users/communities on other platforms that also use the Activitypub protocol like Mastodon
  • Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.

About Lemmy.zip

Lemmy.zip is a Lemmy server aimed at welcoming all and providing a space for all types of topics and discussions, with maybe a slant towards technology and all things related. We are one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software.

Quick Start Guide

- Feed

Your feed may look relatively empty when you first join, with just the Lemmy.zip posts available. This is because by default your view is set to "Local". You can use the options at the top of your feed to see more posts.

  • "Subscribed" will show you the communities you have subscribed to.
  • "Local" will show just posts from communities that are local to Lemmy.zip.
  • "All" will show posts from all communities that have been subscribed to by members of Lemmy.zip from across all servers.

You can also sort your feed by different options, such as "Active", "Hot", and "New".

I fully recommend "Hot" for a good turnover of posts in your feed.

You can set the default Sort and Type in your user settings to your taste.

  • If you can't see your own posts in the feed, go to your settings and make sure Show Read Posts is turned ON!

To help new users settle in to Lemmy, we've added some of what we call "Default Blocks" to your account. These are instances where the content is quite graphic (NSFW) or very political in nature. You are free to remove these whenever you want. Go to your account settings (or click here) and go to the "blocks tab". This is a list of all the blocks you have in place for users, communities, and for instances. You'll see there are already a few instances listed. If you wish to remove these blocks, click the little X next to their names, and you'll be able to interact with them.

You can add these blocks back at any time you like. (In fact, we encourage you to tailor your feed to your preference as much as possible!)

- NSFW

We are now a NSFW enabled instance, which means there may be NSFW content in the Local and All categories if you leave NSFW enabled in your account. If you do not wish to view NSFW content make sure you toggle off Show NSFW content under your Settings.

Another option is to select “Block Community” from the sidebar, when on the specific community. Once you have done that you will never see it again!

- Searching

In the top menu, you’ll see the search icon. There, you can search for posts, communities etc. You can just enter a search-word and it will find the Post-titles, post-content, communities etc containing that word that the server knows of. So any content any user of this server ever interacted with.

You can also search for a community by it’s link, e.g. !lemmy@lemmy.ml or its URL, e.g. https://lemmy@lemmy.ml/. Even if the server hasn’t ever seen that community, it will look it up remotely. Sometimes it takes some time for it to fetch the info (and displays ‘No results’ meanwhile…) so just be patient and search a second time after a few seconds. Please note search time may be increase if remote servers are experiencing high loads.

For a more in depth list of remote communities, you can visit browse.feddit.de or Lemmyverse search. From there you can copy your chosen communities URL and search for it in Lemmy.zip.

- Communities

You can subscribe to any community on another server and post/comment on that server, all from this instance. Once you've subscribed, this server will continue to pull the latest content from that community through to here.

The subscribe button is on the top right of the community. Click this will federate Lemmy.zip with that community.

You can create a community on this server too (there is no restriction on creating communities on Lemmy.zip, unlike some other instances) and anyone else will be able to subscribe to your community.

You can see all of the instances we've federated with by going here or clicking instances in the footer of the webpage.

Creating a community? Once you've created your community, you can advertise it via a couple of different communities dedicated to sharing new communties.

There is no problem with having similar communities across instances, as each can host its own discussions, but it may be a good idea to search for a community before creating it as you may find a group that has already done some of the legwork for you.

While this instance is primarily focussed around game and tech related communities, please don't feel restricted to that. Any topic is fine (and encouraged!) as long as it adheres to the general instance rules.

On Lemmy.zip, anyone can create a Community and become its moderator by default. It takes very little effort to create but requires a little bit of commitment to looking after it. You can always choose to remove yourself as moderator (and ideally hand it off to someone else) or delete it completely if needed.

- Funding

Lemmy.zip will never run ads, sell user data, or generate income in a way that isn't clear and agreed by the community.

Therefore if you're enjoying using Lemmy.zip please consider a small donation to help us keep going for the longer term.

You can find out more information or see who has been kind enough to donate by clicking here!

- Moderating

The Admins for Lemmy.zip are as follows:

You can see mod actions via the this link or by clicking modlog at the bottom of the page.

- Mobile Applications

We have a dedicated mobile/tablet site for those who don't want to download an app. This is a webapp and can be saved to your phone's home screen for easy access.

You can navigate to this site by going to m.lemmy.zip

If you'd prefer a native app, a full list of apps for every platform can be found by clicking here.

An alternative website is also here, where you can filter by platform or type: https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/

These should all work with Lemmy.zip without any issues.

- Joining Lemmy.zip

Currently there are no restrictions on joining this server. Anyone is free to join as long as they continue to follow the rules in the sidebar.

Please interact with Lemmy after you've joined. The more interactions, the better Lemmy will be (plus, it helps out Lemmy.zip too!)

- Help or Support

If you ever feel you need help or support while on Lemmy.zip, or you've seen something that isn't right or makes you feel uncomfortable, you can send Sami or Demigodrick a message and we will confidentially help. We both have secure messaging links in our profile if you'd rather message with encryption, or you can send an email to hello@lemmy.zip and we'll respond that way. We're always here to help.

- Thank you!

Thank you for joining Lemmy.zip. Please remember, the most important thing is that you enjoy yourself!

3
 
 

It's time to do the doings, and update the server with all the lovely fixes and what-nots.

This does mean for about an hour (unless something inevitably stops working and things take longer to recover...) the site will be up and down in various stages, interrupting both the web UI and the API so apps will also be affected.

You can keep an eye on the status of the site during this time by heading over to our status page. I can't promise it will be interesting watching though.

Thanks

Demigodrick

4
submitted 5 months ago by to c/announcements@lemmy.zip
🩵 1
 
 

Hi All,

Just a heads up that Piefed.zip has returned!

Now that security fixes have been implemented, I feel Piefed is in a safe place to allow people to use again.

The original disclosure included a bug that allowed an attacker to send unsigned Create activities and have them processed as legitimate. The additional vulnerabilities allowed anyone with an account to ban any other user, and a couple of other attacks that could lead to an attacker gaining control of an account.

While serious, Rimu has fixed these quickly and we're able to bring Piefed.zip back to life. There will be some time before federation catches back up, please do expect federation delays.

Thanks

Demigodrick

5
 
 

Edit: see pinned comment for update

Hello All,

Due to the incredibly irresponsible disclosure of a security vulnerability for Piefed, we've had to take Piefed.zip offline until a fix can be put in place.

I'll update more once I have more information.

Many thanks

Demigodrick

6
 
 

Sorry for the short notice, but will be doing some updates to the server while I get the chance.

This will involve downtime as the server restarts. The maintenance window lasts 1 hour.

You can keep an eye on status.lemmy.zip if anything unusual happens and we don't come back online!

Thanks

Demigodrick

7
 
 

Original text below this.

Following release of lemmy 0.19.18 we've refederated as this release should fix the bug that caused the issue.

TL;DR

We’ve temporarily defederated from Hexbear due to a Lemmy bug with very deeply nested comment threads.

A thread there triggered repeated crashes on our server, causing errors like 502 pages and “Lemmy is starting” messages. Defederating stops the issue for now.


Announcement

Due to technical issues, we’ve temporarily defederated from Hexbear until a Lemmy update is available that fixes issues with deeply nested comment chains.

There is a known bug in Lemmy (see: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6435 ) where very deeply nested comments can trigger excessive recursion during federation. When Lemmy processes these comments, it recursively fetches and verifies parent comments, which can eventually lead to stack overflows.

Under normal circumstances this happens rarely (we’ve been seeing it maybe once per day), but it becomes much more problematic when multiple new comments are added to an already deeply nested thread. Each new activity can trigger processing of the same deep chain again.

In this case, a thread on Hexbear received a large number of additional replies in a very deep comment chain.

This caused Lemmy to repeatedly process that chain, leading to stack overflows, federation worker exhaustion and timeouts. Simply put, parts of the server were crashing, too many tasks piled up at once, and requests started timing out and failing to load

You may have see this on the website with 502 errors or the lemmy error screen, and on apps it may have presented you with API timeout errors or "Lemmy is starting" errors.

For a visual representation, this graph shows the memory drop each time the server restarts:

The flat bit to the left is good, everything is fine. The choppy bit to the right, not so good, everything is not fine.

Usually its a one-off comment causing this crash, however in this case the user spent a good portion of time bumping the thread, and we had to process each one of those, each causing a crash, restarting the server, and then crashing on the next in the queue, and so on.

I did try removing the offending community from Lemmy.zip to prevent this from happening (It's quite common behavior in that community to bump threads I think), however we still process all the activities from that community - the only certain fix for now is to defederate until a version of lemmy is released that fixes this.

The graph is back to improving now:

Hope that all makes sense!

Demigodrick

8
 
 

Did you miss The Button the first time around?

Now is your chance to have a press! Season 2 starts today.

Sign up now at The Button or join in the discussion at !thebutton@lemmy.zip

9
The Button Has Ended (thebutton.lemmy.zip)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/announcements@lemmy.zip
👎 1 💚 1 🚩 1
 
 

An experiment has begun.

There’s a button.

That’s it. Just a button… and a timer counting down.

Anyone can press it. Everyone sees what happens. And every press changes things forever.

  • One shared button
  • No undo, no reset
  • A collective test of curiosity, restraint… or chaos

Some of you will hold the line. Some of you won’t last five seconds.

Either way, once it’s over… it’s over.

The Button

So the only question is:

Do you press it?


The Button is open to anyone on any federated platform, be that Lemmy, Piefed, Mastodon... even Stegodon!

Any user from any instance can sign in and press the button, but you only get one chance.

To add another layer to this, users can choose which faction to join, and the "winner" is the faction that holds the button the longest amount of time before it eventually runs out.

Initially a press of the button resets the timer to 15 minutes - this may reduce if the game carries on for a while. At the time of this post, there is about 60 minutes until the button expires. The first button press will be available when there's 15 minutes left, i.e. in 45 minutes, but you can sign up now to be ready!

There is also a permanent record of the first pusher :)

10
 
 

Hello all,

Just a pre-warning that there will be some maintenance at 10:00 UTC on Lemmy.zip. This will involve taking the server offline, so there absolutely will be downtime. This window is 2 hours to 12:00 UTC.

If you want to keep up with what is happening, you can join on Matrix. If there are any significant issues, i.e. I can't get the server back up for some reason, I will make an update on Mastodon or Piefed.zip.

There will also be downtime on Piefed.zip.

11
 
 

Sup

Sorry for the short(ish) notice, but I'll do a little bit of updating, restarting, and massaging the server tomorrow. This will probably require a restart, so there WILL be downtime. Obviously I'll try to keep this to a minimum but err.. well, we'll see how the server feels tomorrow.

There will be backups.

There will be sweaty palms.

There will be copious amounts of swear words uttered at terminals.

https://status.lemmy.zip/maintenance/704502

Thanks

Demigodrick

12
 
 

Hi all,

A new front end has popped up! Blorp is a desktop and mobile UI you can try out right now!

Blorp even has a Lemmy community - !blorp@lemmy.ml, if you try it out I'm sure the dev would love some feedback :)

You can access it via blorp.lemmy.zip (and, if you're reading this on Piefed.zip, you can access it via blorp.piefed.zip!).

Hope everyone enjoys their weekend! :)

Demigodrick

13
 
 

Just confirming the upgrade to 0.19.12 was successful, if a bit slower than anticipated.

Apols for the downtime, but hey we didn't have to restore a database this time - great success!

14
 
 

Hi all,

Some scheduled Maintenance so we can feed the hamsters that power the server on their little wheel.

While we're doing that, we'll also update to the latest lemmy version, 0.19.12.

Site will be offline for a small period, and may come up and down during this process.

Thanks

Demigodrick

15
 
 

Hi All,

As the Fediverse continues to expand, we're looking at other platforms we can run with our ethos - open federation, user choice, and fair moderation.

We've seen lots of talk about Piefed, and the benefits of the platform, such as better moderation, combining multiple communities into topics i.e piefed.zip/topic/cats, and the ability for users to better control their own experience.

To that end, we've decided to run our own Piefed instance, located at piefed.zip (I know, original!)

This is very much still under construction, but we feel is now able to accept new users, should anyone wish to join.

If you're interested please check it out, or feel free to ask any questions!

PS - this doesn't affect our Lemmy instance in any way.