Welcome to Lemmy.zip’s & Piefed.zip’s January 2026 server update.
Hope you’ve all settled in to the new year, and I have my fingers crossed that this year will be a calmer and more restrained… wait, fuck, well that’s gone out the window already hasn’t it.
On to the server updates!
Server Updates
##Lemmy.zip
Couple of things - a couple of new Lemmy releases have been applied to the server, namely Lemmy 0.19.4 and Lemmy 0.19.5
These didn’t require database migrations, and so were applied quickly in the background with minimal downtime.
We also changed image formats from Webp to AVIF. It doesn’t affect previously uploaded images, but for the past month or so new images are in the AVIF format. (Thanks and sorry to app developers who’ve had to update their apps to support this ❤️).
Mainly we’re trying to reduce storage space long term so higher quality compression with small file sizes is a win-win.
The war against scrapes is on-going. Thankfully we’ve had no large scale attacks this month, but we still challenge around 100k attempts a day:
Finally, if you’re a mod I’ve done some more work on the mod tools and now giveaways work entirely via the web ui:
I’m trying to chip away at adding more tools for mods to use, if there is anything you’d like to see please let me know and I can add it to the list.
Piefed.zip
Piefed underwent some quite significant downtime while I went about tidying up the docker stuff, rebuilt the reverse proxy, and I finally had time to start looking at the future for Piefed.zip.
FediDB lists Piefed.zip as the 4th most active Piefed server which is really cool. Currently it sits quite nicely on a VPS without any real performance issues. It also has Hetzner’s really awesome daily backup in place (which has saved my skin many times on Lemmy.zip while that was still on a VPS) so I’m not looking to move it anywhere else just yet. But like Lemmy.zip, if/when we get to that stage, we’ll be moving it on to it’s own dedicated server.
During the maintenance, we finally updated the images to be served via media.piefed.zip rather than via the horrible backblaze url.
We also swapped over to Nginx as the reverse proxy instead of Traefik. The simplest reason as to why I did this is that I know Nginx, and Traefik was more of an experiment for me at the time. Unfortunately as Piefed gets more popular, I need to look at things like Geoblocking the UK again, which is just easier in Nginx.
There were also general server updates and tweaks. Still some stuff I need to work on as I ran out of time, including managing to break prometheus somehow.
Please Don’t Be a Lurker!
(I saw this little bit got referenced recently, which is cool!)
If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)
Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip isn’t money, praise, or a boatload of chocolate cookies… maybe. Its participation.
Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or ponder about whether cereal is technically a soup. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession. (We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)
The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.
So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:
Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.
Donations
DotZip sites only continues to exist because of the generous donations of its users. The operating cost of Lemmy.zip is over 60 euros a month ($60, £50), and Piefed.zip is close to 20 euros a month. This is totally funded by the community, and we’re so grateful for all of your support ❤️
Want to support us? We have a range of donation options to suit you!
Liberpay (Card, Paypal)
Liberpay is our newest donation method. You can donate with Paypal or with a card. The link is liberapay.com/dotzip
OpenCollective (Card)
Our classic donation option, but only supports card payments. The link is opencollective.com/lemmyzip
If you’re enjoying Lemmy.zip or Piefed.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the sites and keeping the virtual lights on.
Ko-Fi (Card, Paypal)
We also have our Ko-Fi page if you’d rather use this site, which also supports Paypal and Card payments.
Thank you!
We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can’t express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!
Please remember, traditional social media is only “free” to you because they sell your data. We don’t do that - if you want to support independent social websites like this one and you value your privacy, please consider a small donation. It really does help.
Shiny [redacted] graphs.
What island? I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Piefed.zip
As I said above, I’ve managed to break prometheus (the bit that scrapes the server stats) so where I’m missing stuff I’ve had to fall back to the less detailed hetzner graphs.
CPU Image
RAM (Over 24 hours rather than 30 days) Image
Network traffic: (No, I dont know wtf is going on in this one either, but it calms down when we switch to nginx) Image
Images:
Cloudflare overview: Image
Requests: Image
Bandwidth: Image
Unique visitors: Image
Top Regions: Image
Lemmy.zip
CPU (30 days) Image
RAM: Image
Storage: Image
Images: Image
Cloudflare overview: Image
Requests: Image
Bandwidth: Image
Unique visitors: Image
Regional traffic: Image
So that’s it for the last 30 days - let’s hope the next 30 days are a little more sane.
As always, please let me know if you have any questions or if there are any metrics you’d like to see included in this for the future.
Thanks,
Demigodrick
regedit@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Really appreciate all that you do to make this a great place to waste time! Love the stats. Very cool!