hitagi (ani.social)

I also really like the tunnels feature. It makes self hosting at home easy for those under NAT/CGNAT or whatever it was called.

This Lemmy instance is much harder to maintain due to the fact that I can’t tell what images get uploaded here, which means anyone can use this as a free image host for illegal shit, and the fact that there’s no user list that I can easily see. Moderation tools are nonexistent on here.

0.19.4 provides a way to see uploaded images (although not the best) but this version was only recently released so I can see where the frustration is coming from especially since the CSAM attacks happened nearly a year ago. At the time, I had to make a copy of pictrs, view everything on a file manager, and manually remove those images. People can still upload images without anyone seeing it however.

It also eats up storage like crazy due to the fact that it rapidly caches images from scraped URLs and the few remaining instances that we still federate with.

This was fixed in 0.19.3 (released 7 months ago) where you can disable image “caching”. This has solved storage costs for us together with pictrs’ image processing.

plug in an expensive AI image checker to scan for illegal imagery

It’s unfortunate that we need this. Not everybody has the resources to run fedisafety nor does everyone live in USA where they can use Cloudflare’s CSAM scanner. I think a good way to deal with the issue is to have images that are not public, not be stored (or have no private images at all). This way images can be easily reported.

Overall, I understand the frustration and to some degree I also feel the same but I also limit my expectations considering the nature of the project.

Are server costs just generally cheaper/easier in colonial countries to run or is it purely a money and time thing?

They are cheaper. Locations outside US/EU and very few countries in Asia are sometimes called “exotic” and can be a bit expensive. Lemmy also has this issue where servers that are distant from each other lag behind.

Porkbun asks for your ID now so that might not be “privacy-respecting” but their CS is very helpful from my experience.

I have domains in Netim and Spaceship, and I have no problems with either so far.

Mods and admins can remove posts but they do stay only if they’re “removed”. But if they’re “purged”, then they’re deleted from the server.

https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs/src/branch/main/pict-rs.toml

pict-rs has the option to compress images. Ours is set to WEBP with 1280 pixels either side max.

I don’t remember which update it was but newer versions of Lemmy use significantly less database storage.

I recommend checking out lowendtalk.com if you’re shopping for VPS hosting providers.

I did say the complaint:

The mod tools are too basic and barebones

I also gave three ideas that are (1) manually done by mods/admins, (2) manually done by users, (3) automated by mods/admins.

On a small subreddit I moderate, we have automod automatically queue posts at a certain age. If your account is less than a day old, your post is hidden for public viewing while the mods manually approve it. We had to deal with a lot of spam bots and this was a good solution for us.

I believe the way the report feature works on Lemmy is that it sends out to the mods of the community and all the admins. It doesn't work quite well when I don't know the rules of a community. "No memes on mondays", is that really something I (as an admin) should be worried about? That's not my job.

I hope this clears things up.

The mod tools are too basic and barebones. I'd appreciate if we can get:

• Post approval system for new or low-karma accounts (it can be karma for local communities)
• Reporting system with multiple options (very hard to implement in the fediverse as everyone has different rules) so that the reports are sent to the proper channels. Admins shouldn't have to deal with community-specific rules (for example, "memes only on mondays").
• Automoderator (these might already exist? I have not tried them.)

I don't know if I should split this comment into three or not but they're some general suggestions to address the complaint of basic mod tools.

Proxy is inaccurate. Server is a better term.

It isn’t. I already tried applying for both. You need NCMEC credentials which is only available for those in the US.

edit: Here’s a comment I made about it.

That also isn’t available for non-US people.

Microsoft’s PhotoDNA

My issue with these services is that they aren’t available for non-US people. db0’s project can be deployed anywhere (provided you have a capable GPU).

An LTS distro like Debian and Ubuntu doesn’t update too frequently. I’ve never tried livepatching. I install updates on the weekends and reboot only if necessary. Downtime is usually about a minute and my uptime monitors don’t usually catch it.

One tool that I liked from Reddit was manually approving posts from accounts under a certain age or karma threshold. I hope we can get tools like that one day.

I’m sure the original spirit of selfhosting is actually owning the hardware (whether enterprise- or consumer-grade) but depending on your situation, renting a server could be more stable or cost effective. Whether you own the hardware or not, we all (more or less) have shared experiences anyway.

Where I live, there are some seasons wherein the weather could be pretty bad and internet or electricity outages can happen. I wouldn’t mind hours or even days of downtime for a service whose users are only myself or a few other people (i.e. non-critical services) like a private Jellyfin server, a Discord bot, or a game server.

For a public Lemmy server, I’d rather host it on the cloud where the hardware is located in a datacenter and I pay for other people to manage whatever disasters that could happen. As long as I make regular backups, I’m free to move elsewhere if I’m not satisfied with their service.

As far as costs go, it might be cheaper to rent VMs if you don’t need a whole lot of performance. If you need something like a dedicated GPU, then renting becomes much more expensive. Also consider your own electricity costs and internet bills and whether you’re under NAT or not. You might need to use Cloudflare tunnels or rent a VPS as a proxy to expose your homeserver to the rest of the world.

If the concern is just data privacy and security, then honestly, I have no idea. I know it’s common practice to encrypt your backups but I don’t know if the Lemmy database is encrypted itself or something. I’m a total idiot when it comes to these so hopefully someone can chime in and explain to us :D

For Lemmy hosting guides, I wrote one which you can find here but it’s pretty outdated by now. I’ve moved to rootless Docker for example. The Lemmy docs were awful at the time so I made some modifications based on past experiences with selfhosting. If you’re struggling with their recommended way of installing it, you can use my guide as reference or just ask around in this community. There’s a lot of friendly people who can help!

Matrix but then I realized I only used it for the bridges so now I use Beeper instead. RIP my Matrix server which only served two people.

I really want to say Gandi but they charge too much now and removed the free mailboxes.

Anyway, I’ll vouch for Netim. Their prices are similar to (old) Gandi and they have a mailbox too. I’m looking into Spaceship for some other domains because they’re really cheap.