I'm trying to migrate off of Reddit completely but there are a few communities that still don't exist in the fediverse. Communities for the APS and Australian Unions being a couple of them.

Here's our list of most active communities, and two of them don't have a community icon. I personally blame Lemmy for not putting an empty margin there to line up all the names, although it's a good reminder that we can decorate the community with an icon.

I've quickly searched, and I'm happy to clean any of these up, or clean up another suggestion, so it can be used.

Wikipedia Commons - these are all some form of Creative Commons (and therefore 200% legal to use)

Unknown or licensed (this is a content sharing site on the internet, online copyrights are a joke)

Tagging @arbilp3@aussie.zone , @Nath@aussie.zone

First up.. this is not a call for donations.

Without going into the personal details as to why: I don't have the energy to give this place the attention it needs, and I'm no longer willing to cover the majority of running costs.

I don't have a fully fledged solution to this, and don't have the energy to come up with one. The best I can come up with is I hand the reins over to Nath, and some sort of community funding is set up to cover costs.

If anyone knows of above board methods to establish a crowd funded piggy bank for something like this, I'm all ears.

I made a post from my AZ account in !vamp_tm@ttrpg.network and left a comment under it.

https://aussie.zone/post/35026266

The post seems to have federated fine.

https://ttrpg.network/post/40584555

But the comment did not.

Along with my previous two posts about federation issues with quokk.au, the common factor seems to be AZ, so I suspect that is where the issues stem from.

Hi all, I’m wondering how the server’s going and want to toss a bit of money towards it.

Can we get the donation link and an update?

Thanks for keeping aussie.zone going!!

Time for a brain fart idea,

Should AZ make it a rule that articles/essays must have the author/s in the post title.

1. Better promotion of authors could help readers understand the context of the writers more, and build peoples awareness of the writers and their body of work.

To explain my thought more:

The author of something is important, maybe more important than the title. For instance a George Monbiot article is going to be very different from a Michelle Grattan article. Their worldviews are very different. Not saying either are right or wrong, but understanding that these authors don't write these stories in a vaccum can give a better understanding of what each are trying to communicate leading, especially as familiarity builds, to better context for the reader scrolling through their feed.

2. Might make things harder for a few bot posting accounts. I don't know, this is a side benefit at best.

As reported previously, posts from Quokkau users on AZ communities weren't being federated so AZ and broader fediverse users could see them, but it was at least possible to manually retrieve them.

But with my latest post I was unable to even find the community I wanted to post it to, and after I created it on my AZ account, I have not been able to retrieve it on Quokkau.

I'm honestly not sure which side has the fault here or what fix would be necessary.

None of my posts (or presumably comments, though I haven't checked) in AZ communities seem to have gotten through since 25 days ago.

• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/922741/plans-to-fix-dangerous-weak-link-on-cycling-route-revealed-sylvan-road-bicentennial-to-weste
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/935714/how-many-free-kerbside-car-parks-does-brisbane-really-need
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/935733/the-view-is-beautiful-but-this-brisbane-bench-is-a-little-bit-hostile
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/950285/did-queensland-s-parliamentary-committee-ignore-the-evidence-and-act-on-their-own-emobility
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/952093/the-park-the-promise-and-the-protest-what-s-behind-brisbane-s-olympic-stadium-stoush
• https://quokk.au/c/brisbane@aussie.zone/p/966593/qld-government-contemplates-ditching-anti-junk-mail-measures-and-palming-it-off-onto-council

And that's just within !brisbane. No idea how many other posts may also have gotten lost. Not sure what's up.

I was thinking that as it seems times aren't going to get easier that there should be a section aiming at supporting each other with practical info and also discussing issues to do with family or solo life, children, ageing and health.

Let me know your thoughts and if you like the concept, can you think of alternative names for the community? Let's see what we can come up with.

I'm wondering if there has been any consideration for Aussie.zone to defederate with MAGA.place?

Anyone smart enough to see why

https://aussie.zone/c/localllama@sh.itjust.works

vs

https://sh.itjust.works/c/localllama

Seems like the post itself is ok but not the upvotes, maybe just different lemmy version by 1 just enough to offset it?

Has anybody received this notification this morning?

I assume its from Dessalines or Nutomic, since it came alongside the update.

Here are two of the links:

Solution

Details

So, what does this mean for aussie.zone?

Does this mean we all need to get a Fairphone with e/os, or another non-android handset? What are the options for that?

Does this mean aussie.zone will break with the lemmy developers and become more independent? A kind of forced Fork?

Just wanting to get peoples opinions.

Don't know if I'll attend any,

I'll be thinking seriously about joining the session below, seems up my alley.

Mathilde Sanders (@MathildeS@mastodon.nl) Wants to learn more about: Public (service) social media / business models non profit fediverse.

Anybody else thinking about attending?

Time out from the heavy stuff. This video is not only interesting but will put a smile on your face. It is not rude so can be shared with children (but not young ones as they may not understand) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXjfz0N_JXg

A few days ago I came across a comment in one of this Instance's Communities made by a user of this Instance, which very directly parroted Nazi talking points. Not in a way that was satirising Nazis, but which was endorsing their type of supremacist worldview.

Other comments in that thread noted that the user in question has a history of unironically endorsing a foreign genocidal regime and its actions.

I tried reporting the comment in question, but as of today the comment still stands and the user who made the comment has been as active as ever.

Is this Instance ok with Nazis?

Hi all, i tried to share an image in the 'body' field in the linked post, but it seems to have failed? Not sure what I've done wrong here. Is it the wrong type of file (.jpeg)?

Broken federation due to CloudFlare?It looks like right now NodeBB instances are unable to query anything from aussie.zone because of the CloudFlare bot protection.Could this be adjusted to allow ActivityPub-style requests through?@meta

Hi Aussie.zone.

I just want to put this project called Habitat by Carl Newton, spoken about in this feddit.uk Lemmy Post, on people here's radar as a possibly complementary web based social media project that could be run for communities in Australia. As one of the more experimental segments of social online activity in this country, it makes sense that AZ people may have more than an average interest.

Habitat is a free open-source, self hosted social platform for local communities. It is aimed at fostering local community discussions and discovery of areas of interest. This is why it is built primarily around location. A Habitat instance centers on a specific area, and the local community can make generic posts about that area, or they can make posts about specific locations in that area. - Carl Newton

Its been compared to nextdoor; I could see it used as a bit of an open access rss newsfeed; but there is a most clear tie in as an information source working and integrating with developing open source street maps like Open Street Map. As can be seen in the browsing london video on Newton's blog

Here is an existing/test instance https://www.irthlingborough.net/

edit: changed proposed title to /c/aussocialism. Thanks Zagorath!

There are a few users on here, including myself, who discuss socialist politics. While some topics are interesting and relevant enough to post in other news and politics communities, others might only be interesting to other socialists, such as updates on local political organisations, discussing how theories apply to our economy, or drier historical questions. Consider /r/AustralianSocialism for some examples.

This community will be strictly for Aus/Oceania-specific posts, as there are plenty of communities on other instances for general memes, overseas politics, etc.

Hey, the last couple of days I've been getting error pages with a 500 code. It's been making the instance unusable for me for blocks of time. Anyone else experiencing the same?

The error pages alternate between these two:

https://piefed.social/c/thenetherlands/p/1624368/a-nice-and-peaceful-new-years-in-the-netherlands

https://aussie.zone/post/28227362

Seeing a very different number of upvotes and comments

I like to use RSS feeds to automate my lurking and reading, and its my favorite way to engage with this site. Unfortunately, they haven't been working for several months, which is disappointing and caused me to drift away. Please, get them working again!

Other Lemmy instances work - This is the only instance I attempt to subscribe to which runs into issues. That's not to say if its exclusive here, just that this is the only one I know of.

I use an instance of FreshRSS to read feeds. The logs say: Error Message: cURL error 22: The requested URL returned error: 403 [https://aussie.zone/feeds/c/australia.xml?sort=New]

I get a similar error message for other requested feeds on this instance.

Thanks.

Yes, its been a while since I did one of these... over a year.. oops!.

For something different, I'll post the graphs for the last 12 months, with some explanatory comments.
Feel free to ask question, will do my best to answer.

Finances:
Short version, AZ is costing ~$90 AUD per month to run on current hardware and services. That is partially covered by a small handful of monthly supporters, around $25 per month. The rest is covered by me personally. If you'd like to help cover server costs, any amount is appreciated: https://ko-fi.com/lodion

CPU:

The decrease in August across multiple graphs is due to the AI scraping blocking we put in place. At the time they were effectively DDoSing AZ... since then, I've not heard of any major issues.

Memory:

We're overdue for a lemmy software upgrade to 0.19.13, which should clear out the heavy swap usage. I'll do that tonight... if I remember. Edit: post upgrade, swap freed up.

Network:
As with other graphs, a drop in egress traffic when we blocked AI bots.

Storage:

Cloudflare (30 days):

Cloudflare saving us loads of egress traffic every month, and protecting the site from AI bots. If we weren't using Cloudflare, I don't think AZ would exist as it does today.

I know - you're very probably already sixteen. That's why we are here.

If you've managed to miss the coming change in the law, I envy you. This silly law has taken up several hours of my year that could have been spent doing something more productive like watching Golden Girls.

But, the law is here now and we need to take "Reasonable Steps" to ensure that everyone is over sixteen. If you are wondering what "reasonable steps" is, then join the club. Nobody really knows. What I do know is that we have to start to make an effort to be sure that no young'uns are here against the law.

To that end, we have hired a helpful bot called Molly. She's an expert at being sixteen and she's just been told that it's her job is to verify all your ages. Here she is:

What's next? Well, in the first phase we ask that you drop her a Message that verifies you are over 16. She doesn't want to see your government ID. Some ideas that she would accept are:

1. A passenger takes a photo of your username on a sheet of paper with you driving (please don't make this one a selfie). Faces not required.
2. A photo of your username with a glass of alcohol at a bar.
3. A convincing spiel that would only come from someone older than sixteen (Can you tell Molly who Samantha is?). Can you tell her about the Breakfast Club that only 70's/80's kids from Queensland would know?
4. Anything else you can think of that only someone over sixteen could/would do.

There's no need to spend a lot of time on this. At this point, I'll go through the users who have messaged her and compile a list of people who have verified their age. You can be creative. Just be aware that there's an infinitesimal chance (but not zero) that whatever you send may be sent to some government agency to demonstrate that we are complying with the law.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. How do you know that the user isn't faking their submission? I don't. No method is perfect, we saw kids defeating intricate and expensive verification systems earlier this year. Kids are smart.
2. How do you stop a kid from moving their account to one of the thousands of non-Australian Lemmy Instances and just continuing on with their day? I can't. The fact that the law is totally ineffectual in the context of Lemmy is beside the point. We clearly meet the definition of a Social Media platform according to the law, and we are based in Australia. So we have to comply, even if it is pointless.
3. Are you aware that this is pointless and kids are going to get around it? I know that teenage-me sure would have. But again, that's beside the point. We need to comply with the law.
4. Will you accept a photo of me in my undies? Ok, this one isn't frequent from previous discussions on the law, but I wanted to include it in case. Please don't send NSFW photos to show you are over age.