cross-posted from: https://lemdit.com/post/408034

I like keeping across what is happening with other Lemmy instances so lestat.org was born out of this curiosity.

URL: https://lestat.org

It's similar to lemmy-status.org but with a few notable differences:

• Lestat is running Uptime Kuma
• Lestat monitors all instances listed on join-lemmy.org
• Lestat has a public Discord server where it automatically feeds notifications: https://discord.gg/R8zY7fM5Z8

Criteria for adding instances to Lestat

I will add any instance to Lestat based on these prerequisites:

• The instance is listed on join-lemmy.org
• The instance doesn't host anything illegal in New Zealand

Free services for admins

If you are an instance admin, I can set you up with the following:

• Automatic e-mail notifications when the status of your instance changes (e.g. it goes up or down).
• An uptime badge for your instance in this style:

Send me a message if you'd like any of the above.

I hope you find Lestat useful!

Edit: Added clickable URL and expanded on free admin services to include badges.

I like keeping across what is happening with other Lemmy instances so lestat.org was born out of this curiosity.

It's similar to lemmy-status.org but with a few notable differences:

• Lestat is running Uptime Kuma
• Lestat monitors all instances listed on join-lemmy.org
• Lestat has a public Discord server where it automatically feeds notifications: https://discord.gg/R8zY7fM5Z8

Criteria for adding instances to Lestat

I will add any instance to Lestat based on these prerequisites:

• The instance is listed on join-lemmy.org
• The instance doesn't host anything illegal in New Zealand

Notification service for admins

If you are an instance admin and want to get automatic e-mail notifications from Lestat when your instance goes down, message me and I will set this up for you.

I hope you find Lestat useful!

It was brought to my attention that lemmy.comfysnug.space also hosts "loli porn". This content is illegal in New Zealand as well as many other countries.

Needless to say they have been defederated and all their communities purged from our server.

I'm mostly posting this in the spirit of transparency as I don't think this affects anyone here.

Please let me know if you do come across another similar instance, there are simply too many of them out there for me to check proactively.

I sincerely hope that this was the last of them, but if there are more, I also don't think it's worth me making an announcement every time we defederate one. I may instead create a generic defederation post where we keep tabs on who we defederated and why, but I welcome your feedback.

As a reminder, the Lemdit ethos sets out our stance on federation, notably:

Defederating from other instances is an absolute last resort and we will only do so under the following circumstances:

• If their content has the potential to get us into legal trouble
• If they are acting as an attack vector towards us

Alexandrite is a beautiful desktop-first alternative web UI for Lemmy.

The Lemdit Alexandrite instance can be accessed at https://a.lemdit.com

You can find more info on Alexandrite here: https://github.com/sheodox/alexandrite

You may have noticed that Lemdit was down for about 2 hours earlier (if you did notice, then I hope the status page kept you informed).

Below is a summary of what was done:

• Host software updates (some things required a restart).
• Host hardware upgrades - larger SSD installed and Lemdit migrated to it. This was not done out of necessity, but for future proofing.
• VM image back-ups - this is a separate activity to the nightly DB backups
• Lemmy upgraded to 0.18.3 - this version comes with significant DB improvements and required a DB migration.

Overall it took longer than I hoped it would, but I think it was all worthwhile.

Please let me know if you notice any weird behavior from Lemdit.

We had an outage, Lemdit fell over while I was asleep so bad timing. It looks like it was down for about 4 hours.

I'll look into what caused it, I have a script that tries to automatically recover Lemdit from the usual crash, but something else happened here.

Anyway if you tried to access it and couldn't - sorry! It's back now.

Edit:

I believe this was caused by cache depleting all available RAM (impressive considering we've got 128 GB allocated). This isn't normally supposed to cause an issue as cache is meant to be cleared to make room for app usage, but in practice it can be problematic and it's likely what got everything to fall over.

I've got a cron job in place that will clear cache daily now so this won't happen again.

Here's a graph if you're curious, the outage occurred ~3:30AM, the drop you see is me restarting the VM:

A familiar desktop experience for Lemmy

The Lemdit Mlmym instance can be accessed at https://old.lemdit.com

You can find more info on Mlmym here: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym

I'm curious to get your thoughts on Lemmy. What is your impression so far? Are you enjoying it? What would you like to see different?

If you're using Lemdit, then I'm really interested to get your feedback on what your experience is like. Is there anything we can improve? Any other suggestions or ideas?

Security has been a hot topic for Lemmy recently and privacy is something that we all care about. Here's how we're set up to handle both.

Security

As a self-hosted Lemmy instance, we're actually in a slightly better position than many:

• The server is not remotely accessible from outside the local network (it doesn't need to be).
• The Lemmy admin interface is not remotely accessible from outside the local network (even if my Lemmy account ends up compromised through some exploit, the potential harm from that is greatly reduced).

We also have more generic network security measures in place:

• The server sits behind a hardware firewall.
• The Lemmy instance sits behind a reverse proxy.
• Internal networks are segregated from each other.
• IP whitelisting is used for all internal remote access.

Nothing on the Internet is unhackable and we're no exception. However, we're too small to be an attractive target and we're sufficiently hardened to avoid being a target of opportunity.

Privacy

Being self-hosted has a number of advantages here too. Lemdit does not use any 3rd party web services whatsoever:

• No cloud hosting of any kind
• No external e-mail service
• No CDN
• No DoS protection
• No analytics
• No ads
• You name it, we don't have it.

Privacy is important to me personally and all the trade-offs I have made have been in favour of privacy.

Lemdit runs an unmodified version of Lemmy available from its official GitHub repository.

What Lemdit knows about you:

• Standard NGINX access logs are kept for 2 weeks (IP address, time stamps, etc).
• The Lemmy database contains the e-mail address that you signed up with.
• The mail server has a record of e-mails that were sent to you by Lemdit.

This data is not available to anyone else and only legal/law enforcement action could compel us to share it.

Legal

Due to the nature of federated services, all of your engagement (your profile; posts; comments; messages; votes) on this platform should be considered public. We highly recommended that you do not share any information on Lemdit, or the Lemmy platform, that could in any way personally identify you.

Internet regulations are increasingly complex and country specific. To navigate this complexity, we rely on TermsFeed to define our Terms and Conditions, as well as our Privacy Policy. This post tries to describe some of the key points in plain English, but does not act as a substitute for these documents.

I'm not a lawyer nor do I have the time to try and prettend I'm one, so while I dislike long documents written in Legalese, that's what we have in place for now.

We now have a Status page that monitors Lemdit services, as well as a backup Discord server:

• Status: https://status.lemdit.com/
• Discord: https://discord.gg/7Y2CgAEG5q

The purpose of these is to keep you informed on what is going on with Lemdit and give you a way to contact me should anything go wrong.

lemdit.com / *.lemdit.com will automatically redirect to the Status page in the following scenarios:

• Planned outage (server maintenance, updates, etc)
• Unplanned outage caused by software or hardware failure

lemdit.com / *.lemdit.com will be unreachable in the following scenarios:

• Unplanned outage caused by connectivity or prolonged power failure

I get automatically notified of any outage and will keep you up to date via the Status page and/or Discord.

The Status page also sends automatic notifications to the Discord server when services go down or when they recover.

If Lemdit has gone offline and I'm nowhere to be found for a few days (think vlemmy.net), then you can assume something happened to me.

Voyager is an Apollo-like open source web client for Lemmy. It’s a mobile-first app, but works great on desktop devices, too.

The Lemdit Voyager instance can be accessed at https://m.lemdit.com

As a webapp, Voyager is easy to install on your phone through your browser controls.

You can find more info on Voyager here: https://github.com/aeharding/voyager

It feels like I've been spamming these updates recently, but it has been an eventful week for Lemmy and it's worth being on the version that has the least holes in it.

Unless there is a compelling security concern or they fix the broken theme appearance, I'm going to start limiting these updates to once a week going forward.

I’m about to perform this update in the next 10 minutes, all things going well there should be no downtime/instability.

The DB is backed up, I’ll post an update here once everything’s done.