Alt account of poVoq@slrpnk.net

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Joined 8 days ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Regarding the price and all that, maybe that is an interesting discussion to have with the slrpnk.net community? And it would also be good to let slrpnk.net users know how the instance is being ran, what hardware, where, etc, so users can be an educated decision on whether they want to see an instance or not? Maybe providing that info on the sidebar would be nice?

    We have been very transparent about that and documented that in the wiki which is linked in the sidebar. But it seems few people ever read the Wiki and having it integrated like it is with Piefed would probably help.

    I agree that more admins with remote access would be good to have, and we have been working towards adding more (there are already more than one, who are not directly involved with slrpnk, but rather the mother project f-hub.org), but physical access will always be limited by the location (Azores) unless we move to an entirely different data-center (which in turn would make it hard for me to access the physical servers).



  • For regular users there is not a huge difference, but the web-interface is significantly faster and you can subscribe to topics that combine multiple communities. The disadvantage is less mobile app support. Right now only Interstellar supports Piefed.

    The real advantage is for moderators and admins, as the Piefed developers actually listened to community feedback and implemented a lot of nice moderation features that require bots or annoying work-arounds on Lemmy.

    And there are a few technical differences that make Piefed easier to administrate and troubleshoot from a sysadmin perspective.


  • I am genuinely confused. What makes you think you were ignored? We do have additional admins, the problem is physical access to the servers to replace hardware that seems to have broken.

    We plan to add additional safeguards to such scenarios, but in the end it is a trade-off between reliability and costs. Running a Lemmy instance of our size on a fully managed rented server would easily triple the monthly costs. This would be beyond what I am willing to cover out of my own private pocket, thus making the instance dependent on donations. And that IMHO makes it more likely to be shut down in the future as donations are very variable.

    I am not on vacations, but on a work deployment abroad, which further limits the time I can spend on this. Not that it would have made much of a difference, but at least the domain redirection and placeholder text was only possible to do on the weekend.









  • Slrpnk.net admin here.

    The failure seems to have been in the main firewall, if it had been the server itself we could have easily restored it on another server from the backups on another machine. But as it stands, remote access is entirely cut off.

    There usually is another person with hardware access, but they are on summer holidays. This seemed like an acceptable risk at the time…

    An off-site backup would have been nice of course, but due to the costs involved in running an Lemmy instance of that size on a rented server, it would have not been a great option either.

    I have plans to add a KVM to the main firewall via a secondary connection, but even that might have not helped in this case. I’ll know more when I have physical access again.



  • Not necessarily, no. We aim to preserve users, communities and posts/comments. Image uploads might get lost though.

    Such an in-place migration will need extensive database operations and likely some support by the Piefed developer (to add support for bcrypt hashed passwords), but we are hopeful to make it happen and maybe this will result in a database migration script other Lemmy instances could also use.

    If this turns out to be infeasible, we will stay with Lemmy rather than reset everything.