sunaurus

u/sunaurus@lemm.ee
71 posts · 754 comments

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Hard to say exactly what the cause was, as I don't know what username they used on lemm.ee (doesn't seem to be the same one that was used on Reddit), but it's most likely:

  1. They did not verify their e-mail address
  2. They did not agree to follow lemm.ee rules in the sign-up form

We'll get some more control over images when 1.0 comes, I will take a look at it again then, but in general the new user cooldown for image uploads has really significantly reduced the amount of image related abuse we have seen.

@Character_Locked@lemm.ee please understand, nobody on our admin team is getting paid to moderate disgusting images, they are volunteering to do it, and it takes a mental toll. Also, image hosting itself is not free. Our donations right now are barely breaking even with server costs. So realistically, our options are not "current situation vs fully unrestricted image uploads", they are "current situation vs completely burned out admin team and costs increasing beyond donations".

Our servers are all hosted in Finland indeed, but we use Cloudflare for DDoS protection etc. Clients/bots/scripts/etc (like FediDB) don't see our server IP addresses directly, they see Cloudflare IP addresses. FediDB uses the IP address it sees to assume what country the server is in.

The same is true for a bunch of other Lemmy servers as well - a lot of the ones FediDB shows as "United States" are actually hosted in Europe (or elsewhere).

Most applications are handled automatically, a smaller percentage is sent to manual approval for admins. This is based on different signals and the aim is to potentially reduce some abuse, or at least make it a bit harder.

Median time for accepting applications in the past month on lemm.ee was 1 minute and 42 seconds. And that includes the time it took for users to manually verify their e-mails first.

on *Permanently Deleted* · c/meta · 2 pts · 1y

It's very unlikely lemm.ee will ever be a suitable host for video content. Please host your videos on other platforms, embedding them on lemm.ee posts will work just fine.

Whenever you give your free time and energy to build something open source for the world, there are always some people who say “why aren’t you giving me 10x more, you lazy dev” 😅

Hey, for the past few weeks, we have been tuning different rate limits and other bot prevention mechanisms on lemm.ee. We have had a huge increase in traffic lately, as well as a couple of instances of what was effectively a DDoS.

In other words, the problems likely have nothing to do with your app or different versions, and everything to do with our own measures.

For the mark post as read endpoint, I recently made the rate limit a bit more relaxed, so hopefully users won't see issues there anymore. OTOH, we are also presenting a Cloudflare challenge for some IP ranges currently, which may inadvertently affect legit users. This was necessary to mitigate a recent DDoS, but we will continue tuning and hopefully restore things to normal for legit users soon.

In my experience, it's mostly a combination of confusing Lemmy UI + user error:

  1. When using the e-mail verification link, Lemmy just shows a blank page with a tiny "e-mail verified" notification in the bottom left corner, which people miss. They then assume that it didn't work, because all they see is a blank page.
  2. When opening the e-mail verification link multiple times, only the first time registers, and further attempts will generate confusing errors. This also makes people assume it didn't work, but in reality, their e-mail got verified successfully.
  3. On lemm.ee, it's very common for people to sign up with typos in their e-mail addresses (happens few times every week recently).
  4. We have a custom question on our sign-up page asking people to state they agree to our rules, and it's relatively common that people just don't read the question and write something random in there - we generally don't accept such applications to try and weed out bots, but I'm pretty sure we also end up rejecting a bunch of legit users this way who just didn't read the instructions.

Generally I'm happy to provide support to people in such cases if they reach out to me directly, but at the end of the day, the easiest and fastest solution if the account is truly stuck in limbo is just to create another account.

It's a shame that there is so much potential friction on sign-up, but at the same time, I don't see us reducing the friction on lemm.ee any time soon, because this is the lesser evil compared to bot sign-ups etc that we have seen in the past.

Thank you very much for the support!

Our infrastructure costs are currently quite stable at around 200€ per month, and considering that the instance is right now quite decently supporting nearly 6000 monthly active users, you could say that you are indeed relatively contributing a ton - you are effectively covering server costs for 60 people!

The fact that it’s a monthly amount is particularly great, because with recurring income, we will get advanced warning if there is danger of funds starting to run low.

We had a few really huge days in 2023, but other than those, it seems like the growth so far in March is definitely outpacing our initial wave of new users in 2023.