Merry Christmas

🦘🦘🦘

Sounds pretty good! I hope you're enjoying a break.

Thanks for fixing it!

🫩🫩🫩 that's what I get for not whitelisting the health checker*

We are up now :s !

I'll that sorted

old.reddthat.com is still down

We are back!

Woo, what a milestone. This calls for a short celebration.🍾 It's nice to see the server doing well and healthy.

Hey, if you need any assistance, I happen to be a DevOps engineer. Not sure how much help I could give, and my own $job comes first too as well of course, but I'm sure there's a bit of overlap somewhere where my skills may be of assistance if you need me for something specific and small to be implemented, and I'm quick at the pickup at least.

I'm also familiar with Docker. Though granted, in CICD (create/build/destroy) scenarios, not in persistent hosting.

Yeah we have implemented go-away on https://old.reddthat.com/ but only as a test and it's worked well. I haven't made the time to implement it for our main endpoint.

I also want to do exactly that, only show the challenge for non-logged in users which adds a small bit of complexity but my $job has been flat out recently. So I've only been doing moderation duties rather than server admin duties.

But I can think of plenty of edge cases that something could happen or affect regular users and I don't want that to happen. Normally the bots are all like the ones we just had, using open proxies/residential proxies and querying either posts or the API directly.

I'm hoping to carve out some time in the next month to coincide with this maintenance or our server migration to do some solid testing.

Ouch, that's just so annoying. Maybe some sort of human challenge for anyone that's not authenticated whenever the server load is high could help?...

Edit: unless the scraping is coming from the ActivityPub protocol as a bunch of instances trying to federate (or something? I'm still not familiar with how it all works, besides the payloads looking like a bunch of .json), in which case, my suggestion probably wouldn't apply all that well.

Unfortunately not. We are in a queue that will happen... Whenever OVH (our server host) lets me know.

The outage/downtimes just now were because an AI scraper just brought down the server. We had ~81000 unique IPs spam our little server. It wasn't a smart AI scraper so I managed to block them and we are back to being up and working.

Looks like Reddthat is back. The upgrade was a success I hope?

Feels really nice to see my contribution at work improving a community that is so accepting. You're very quick on that too!

It's nice to see a small and pleasant community grow. We really do need much more of these these days, maybe not all in one place or we may unintentionally emulate the social media giants in result if not in ideal despite our best intentions, but much more of it, in every corner of the internet.

Edit: I'm not talking about Reddthat in any way, by the way. I'm just mildly (very mildly for now) concerned when looking at Lemmy.world. It's not what their doing, or how their doing it. It's the size of that instance and the number of large communities that spring up there. I'm happy for them for reaching the size they have, but federation and decentralization are very powerful stuff that would prevent any one ideal from a very small few people from dominating. We'll all benefit from a diverse set of opinions, even if I would disagree harshly with some of them. And having them all in one place would necessarily prevent that from happening while leaving little room for alternatives.

!rainworld@lemmy.world (a game I had fond memories of) was a community in Lemmy.world. There are traces of it's existence and once some decent activity from the outside (src), but I don't know what happened to it at all. It's just gone... Maybe it's been put into private visibility, which would be the best case scenario, but I can't help but worry that something else might have happened to it. It's a really wholesome community elsewhere on Reddit and YouTube, and it would be a shame if it no longer exists in Lemmy when it once did.

We really do need that decentralization and "replication" of similar communities across different instances run by different people to not have that happen as much. Even if just to protect from a server going down completely like Lemm.ee, as well as the seeming ending of a community by other means.

Um, sorry for the long post. I just had some stuff on my mind, I didn't intend to make it this long when I did the edit.

<3 !

Thanks a heap Apple!

May your day be filled with lots of coffee! As the server is going to be getting an upgrade because of your generosity ☺️

I could have sworn rounding up would've been just enough to cover it. But after fees, I've appeared to have fallen just short.

But that should be okay, this should help relieve you of that donation stress for the year ahead I hope.

So, seeing as how it is now at $19.63/week, and assuming you're not getting any donations from anywhere else...

You're short about just under A$38/month.

It wouldn't be fair for you to both maintain the server on your own time and pay for it out of your own pocket...

Ah, why not. Here's a year's worth of $38/month (A$456) to tide you over.

Haha! Well it's 1TB for local storage which for all intents and purposes is unlimited. As if Reddthat's database grows to more than that all of the bigger instances will probably be 10x that size!.

For our object storage we've already grown to 2TB of images and videos so even if we had purchased this when we started and didn't use an object storage we would have already surpassed it greatly!

Unlimited storage for $2 more sounds like a good deal. I hope it's legit.

Thank you so much!

Thanks! And technically yes, but if/when we move to the dedicated server we will have a lot more processing power and resources available.
If I also spun up the piefed instance, I'd be getting more admins and maybe asking people if they wanted to admin on it as well to help me.
To alleviate the possible problems with moderation I was thinking that if I made it paid only/yearly subscription the cross section of people who would actually want to pay and who want a piefed instance would be very small. I'm thinking $5/m. (Or whatever your local coffee amount is).

I was thinking of making it paid because if people end up posting images and videos it gets costly fast. Even now we are on a very cheap plan with our storage but it slowly is ever increasing and in 3 years I expect it to the same as our server bills.
This could be the semi-paid version of Reddthat and to ensure that we would stay online for as long as possible.

These are ideas that I've been toying with in my head.

Yep! No one's sent any crypto recently and nothing in Ko-Fi either. Not since the closure of Open collective at least. So I haven't included them.

According to https://reddthat.com/post/25633 there’s payment options for librepay, ko-fi, and a few different crypto options. This post mentions ~A$22/week in total income revenue, which matches what librepay reports. What’s the income from all the other sources? Are they all ~A$0?

Thank you Tiff for all the hard work! I'm glad things have gotten better.

A piefed instance could be interesting, but wouldn't that mean extra load for you?