This is our 3 year anniversary! And without you guys this wouldn't have happened. I'm glad we have all these passionate people all over the fediverse willing to post the most amazing retro content.

Thankfully it was another pretty quiet year for us as admins of this site. But this is business as usual for us by now, as our site usually doesn't attract a lot of rowdy people.

This was the year that we launched our other retro inspired fedi-place called Retrofed, a PieFed based instance. This software has also proved to be great, and this is my preferred home for browsing myself (but, don't worry, retrolemmy will remain to exist as long as we physically can). We have added topics and feeds there, that can make subscribing and/or following content much easier. Hopefully these feeds will also work on lemmy if and when lemmy 1.0 gets here.

I'm glad you people are here. It's always amazing seeing a retrolemmy account in the wild, and it's great seeing all the active communities and posts here too! Thanks for another fun year!

Cheers!

Earlier this month I created a new community devoted to retro mobile phones. I specifically chose RetroLemmy as host instance for reasons that should be obvious: focus on retro technologies. But I am very new to the fediverse (refugee from Reddit), and back on that other site I never owned or moderated a sub - hence I am new to the realities of community management as well. So far I am the only one who has posted in my newly started community, others have only commented - but no problem, everyone has to start somewhere.

Because of federation, and because Lemmy UI appears to always show /all by default (as opposed to just those communities which you are subscribed to, which was my experience on Reddit), the posts which I've been making in my niche community, devoted to a highly specialized and niche topic, have been showing up in feeds of people who have absolutely no interest in the topic at hand - or worse, have an extremely negative, hostile view regarding the retro technology I am passionate about. These non-participants have been heavily downvoting my retro community posts, and one particularly nasty person came into my 2G-centric community to make comments about how much they hate 2G and want it to die. So now I am thinking that it may be necessary to resort to use of moderation powers, perhaps even bans if gentler means fail, to keep haters out and control their damage. But before I do anything along those lines, I need to ask instance admins and fediverse elders in general for their guidance - hence this post.

First question to admins of this instance: would it be acceptable if I set rules in my community that prohibit bashing comments and malicious downvotes? Bashing here means a comment by someone with no interest in the topic at hand who came to comment only to tell us how much our retro tech sucks and how stupid we are to engage in this hobby etc. A malicious downvote means a downvote driven by the same motivation, dislike of the very topic that our community centers around. I would like to make a rule in retromobilephones community that bashing comments and downvotes are prohibited, and that repeat offenders will be subject to bans. Question to RetroLemmy instance admins: would such community rule be acceptable?

A second question is how to deal with hate that comes in the form of downvotes rather than comments. A hateful comment can be removed by a mod - but can a mod also remove malicious downvotes? If someone gets banned from a community, I assume the ban will make further downvotes impossible, but will it also wipe out already-made downvotes - or do those stay? And is there a gentler method that could be used before resorting to bans? With hateful comments, I reason I can remove the offending comment and let the commenter know that they broke the "no hate" rule, such that repeat offenses will result in a ban - but the first offense gets only comment deletion, not a ban. Is there any way to handle downvotes similarly, some way to remove a downvote without reaching for the ban hammer as first response?

Any advice or guidance would be appreciated - TIA!

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.18.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.17.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.16.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes. Also I've worked on stability issues, and it should be more stable now.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

Hi there, i am now a retro indie game developer for a long time (>15 years). Beside other things i developed a real-time browser game, a card game and more. I did it all without a contracts to publishers (which is pretty hard - and naturally without any monetary payoff).

For the last 6 years i worked on a fully libre-open-source textbased, sandbox-style, storydriven, retro-style cyberpunk network-sandbox game.

The game is text-based, so... there is no much to show, but i post a screeny below(https://retrolemmy.com/pictrs/image/c6442b29-988d-432f-8a9b-91706540aea5.png)

The game is ready for deployment and a real gem (i am very proud of it!). It just depends linux and some super-basic command-line tools.

It is 100% libre-open-source and very cleanly written and it has a tranparent build-system (means: the user builds an chroot-app on his/her computer) - which makes as safe, as your system. It runs in a isolated cgroup-enviroment via bwrap. It should build on any linux distro and run "on a toaster" (sbc is enough)

To host this, a git repo would be the best solution. (A static html-page would be enough for that - check the style of the suckless static git-pages: https://git.suckless.org/dmenu/log.html)

BUT... i have no phone (and i don't intend to get one) -> it looks like, that it is impossible to host a git repo without a phone.

I am searching for a hosting solution, without the need to have a phone.

Or better: I search for a partner that would host this project with me. The project itselft is (naturally) free of charge and libre-open-source. Could be part of a git-page-presence or a simple static html-subdomain.

I really think that this is a really cool underdog indie game which will bring some prestige to the hosting partner.

Pls. tell me your thoughts and suggestions.

PM me if you have interest in a cooperation.

thx in advance

edit: SOLVED (thx to /u/smeg@feddit.uk)

solution: https://codeberg.org/ennix/Jailbreak-Katana

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.15.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

A discussion here https://retrolemmy.com/comment/17259757 had me thinking about consolidating some dead communities.

!TheWalkingDeadGame@retrolemmy.com

• was deleted because there were no real posts, instead go to !adventuregames@retrolemmy.com

!retroarch@retrolemmy.com

• won't be deleted because it has posts in it, but we could make a pinned post to direct users to !emulation@sh.itjust.works

!sbcgaming@retrolemmy.com

• could either direct users to !emulation@sh.itjust.works or !retrogaming@lemmy.world

!retrostatus@retrolemmy.com

• could direct users to !retrogaming@lemmy.world

Hello!

There was some downtime today, so I took the chance to update the retrolemmy server to 0.19.13.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

My personal favorite new addition is the search in the sidebar for communities.

Not related to retrogaming, but related to gaming.

Another year has passed, and it's been a relatively quiet year for RetroLemmy. Since the last anniversary we had a few lemmy updates, we added a working email functionality (which helps for our response time for new registrations), not much downtime (with the exception of the huge downtime last April) and we added an "in case of emergency" communication line through Mastodon (@DosDude@mastodon.social). We also had the biggest influx of users this year, with the 2nd Reddit exodus, and have almost sextupled in users!

Admin-wise, it's not a lot of work (I'm sure some of you were wondering about that). We don't intend to interfere often, and we haven't done it much in the past. Sometimes we ban the random spam account, and the occasional rowdy person. But nothing too bad. For actual non-spam accounts we don't intend to perma ban, unless they keep breaking the few rules we have.

Now for my personal thanks:

I want to thank everyone for being here, making accounts and/or communities. We had a few new active communities this year, and it puts a smile on my face every time I see a new post in the local tab.

We also have some very active users that joined this year, and seeing local users in the wild is always fun. But all the lurkers are also very much appreciated, and you don't have to feel compelled to suddenly post and/or comment ;).

To another year of awesome retro fun!

Cheers.

Hello!

I’ve just updated the retrolemmy sever to 0.19.12

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

I know in this instance we don't have Windows XP communities but maybe It's in here somewhere who knows... Came here to say I made a Teamspeak 3 server to be compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista but also it can be accessed through modern machines as well. The idea of this server is be able to use Teamspeak again to communicate with your friends like back in the golden times when XP and Vista were still alive, without the need for difficult modern stuff like forcing Discord in your poor old computer.

So you can access the server clicking here: https://www.gametracker.com/server_info/66.179.92.114:9987/ or here: https://www.gs4u.net/en/s/382616.html

In these links you will be able to know how to access the server and how much the client is compatible with your specs. Server also can be accessed through phones, but requires old Teamspeak app to make it work. (Latest Teamspeak versions aren’t compatible with the server).

Besides that I’m also archiving old plugins and customizations for the old client to customize your experience with it, so if someone have new ideas to customize the client, pls let me know in server! 😁

Now although the server is related to people that uses minimum Windows XP, I talked in the server with many people that also is very familiar with DOS and 98 topics, so even tho It's not possible to access the server on Windows 98, we can still share the knowledge behind it between each other...

I'm sorry to say we had over a day of downtime starting yesterday. I'm not sure what happened, but it seems to have happened the day after the maintenance from the provider.

This is the story so far:
The day before yesterday (the 24th) the server was offline for a few hours due to maintenance on the provider side. It was announced beforehand, but the exact date of the maintenance was not, so I assumed it was the maintenance.

Yesterday (the 25th) the server went offline again. Since it was still within the announced maintenance window, I assumed it was also part of that. After a while the server still didn't come online, so I started worrying.

I called the provider yesterday, as it seems the server just disappeared. They put out a ticket to the service department, and all we could do was wait.

The server came back online today without warning, and a backup was restored. This means there is at least a little data lost from the last time it was online, but it's at least a very recent backup. In any case more recent than my own backup.

We hope the problems are now gone, and the server is as stable as it was before the maintenance.

We are truly sorry for the inconvenience.

Hello!

I’ve just updated the retrolemmy sever to 0.19.11

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without any problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Reminder you can choose your theme on your settings page:

https://retrolemmy.com/settings

i386-dark is our new default. The old default is darkly/litely.

Any thoughts on the default?

Edit: and our default is back to darkly/litely

Hello!

I've just updated the retrolemmy sever to 0.19.10

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn't show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without any problems, and only took less than a minute.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Hello!

I've just updated the retrolemmy sever to 0.19.9

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn't show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without any problems, and only took less than a minute.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

I have just added email functionality to retrolemmy. Notifications can now end up in you email. If this is not working, make sure you've enabled "Send notifications to Email" and either look in your spam folder, or re-add your email in your profile settings.

This does not mean there is an email requirement. Adding your email to your profile is completely optional, and will always be optional.

It happened. Retrolemmy turns 1 as of today, juli 20th.

This year has flown by. But knowing that lemmy only was on 0.18.1 it also feels like such a long time ago. I have learned so much thanks to this site. But still have so, so much to learn.

I want to thank everyone here on retrolemmy and lemmy as a whole for being here. For making this my new home online after the reddit exodos. I want to thank spez (fuck you spez), because without him this amazing place on the internet wouldn't be here. I want to thank @Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com for making time to help out here. I want to thank all the mods on the communities. I want to thank my family, for being patient with me when I broke the page again (and again and again) and spent the evening trying to fix it.

Most of all, I want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for giving this place a shot, and being here.

To another year of awesome retro fun!

Cheers.

Hello,

The server had some stability issues, so I decided it was time to upgrade. The new server has a few more cores, double the memory and a disk upgrade. (the disk upgrade was not needed, but included in the package, and it can't hurt)

I assume most stability issues have been fixed now. If you notice anything, feel free to contact me here on lemmy or reply to this thread.

Thank you for your patience!