Welcome to Lemmy NZ
We don’t have many members, so until that changes, feel free to subscribe to communities on other instances.
At the top of the screen click Communities, then rather than Subscribed or Local, instead choose All.
This will show all the communities (like subreddits) that are currently federated (connected) with this instance (site).
You can comment on posts in these communities and interact with them the same as users on that instance, and others can subscribe to and post in our communities too.
On the home page, try the “All” tab to see all posts from all instances we federate with.
If you want more information on Lemmy and how it works, see How does this all work, anyway?
@Dave@lemmy.nz, if there’s anything you need to keep the server running please ask.
Will do! It’s currently running on a $2/month VPS that I already had, so be sure to let me know if things are slow.
DM me if you want. We run fediservices.nz - Happy to sponsor this with a free NZ based VPS and anything else you need.
I went to register the domain and saw it was already taken 😅
That sounds great! I was just looking at upgrading the VPS in anticipation of more users come 12 June and 1 July, but if you’re offering :D
I’ll flick you a DM
Thanks for setting this up! Seemed like a good place to land while I explore what my post Reddit world will look like.
Thanks for joining!
Hii! Thank you for setting this up! Looking forward to fun times and hangouts :D
Thanks for setting up a NZ based instance @Dave. I found it while looking for alternatives to lemmy.ml since it’s been quite unstable the last few days most likely due to the high number of new users.
It’s probably early days but I’m a platform/DevOps engineer so further down the line if you need a hand with scaling or other platform related tasks, I’m happy to help.
Can I suggest creating a community for !newzealand@lemmy.nz? Hopefully we can get enough traction for it to be the r/nz replacement. Still quite new to Lemmy and I didn’t see an option to do this myself.
Welcome!
Currently, there are 3 users, I didn’t want to have a bunch of communities created and no one in them, so I’ve disabled the option for users to create communities (this is toggle-able in Lemmy). I spent a bit of time on Beehaw.org before setting this up, and read a bit about their thought processes for why things are set up the way they are on their instance. I like the approach, and so have set some things up the same way they have.
I haven’t disabled downvoting like they have. Undecided on that one, but I do see their point.
I will create !newzealand, I do think that makes sense. I also think a !news@lemmy.nz makes sense, but probably for starters everything could just go in the !newzealand community. I also thought it would be cool to have a bot post news stories from RSS or even have a community where a bot posts the top stories from reddit’s r/newzealand so we can have our own conversations about them and not feel like we’re missing out on current events.
I’m not a platform/DevOps engineer, so I may need help at some point! So far I’ve had the help I need from the Lemmy Instance Admins chat on Matrix. It was pretty straightforward to set up, I’ve seen much worse. But the instructions were not exhaustive :D
I am a software developer with some platform/devops tendencies. I’d be keen to help out with anything in the future.
I just replaced all my bookmarks with lemmy / mastodon. I don’t really enjoy the mastodon format yet but I guess that makes sense as I preferred Reddit over Twitter.
I was just looking at writing a bot for lemmy but I’m not sure what would be useful at this point.
Anyways, thanks for setting this up. I found it by going to register the domain name and I saw it was already registered so I joined. 😊
Thanks for the offer! there are a couple of lemmy bots I’ve seen on Github, but like you I’m not sure it would be helpful yet. But probably eventually we will need it.
Thanks for setting this up! I had thought about doing it myself, but glad someone else did, since I wouldn’t really have time to maintain it! :)
Wait, I’m supposed to maintain it?
You could end up with a lot of work when all those reddit subs go dark!
Haha yes, it’s terrifying. We should probably plan for it. It’s hard to know how to plan for it, though!
Probably should upgrade from the $2/month 1 core 2GB RAM VPS it’s currently running on. Though it seems to be doing ok, oddly RAM seems like the biggest problem (larger instances say it’s CPU), but there is some stuff I can do to mitigate that. And it’s not really a huge problem.
It would be good to build up a userbase ahead of that time to work out when things start getting slow. So far I think most issues have been with federation, partly because of slow instances we are federating with but also some odd ones still unsolved.
If it gets to that stage - Patreon is a pretty decent way to get support! I’m supporting my Mastodon instance through there. There’s also an Open Collective thing https://opencollective.com/ocnz
Hey thanks for the thought, I’ve actually had a VPS donated by fediservices.nz so we should be sorted as soon as I can get us migrated.
Any donations can go their way: https://opencollective.com/nz-federated-services
You might need to consider putting limitations on sign-ups temporarily if it becomes a problem.
Haven’t managed anything on the fediverse myself, but have heard that (as you mention) federating content is what causes the delays… even if you have a small server, you still have to sync a lot from the big highly active servers, which can eat up a lot of CPU
Yeah, most of the instances require approval for signups. I started like that, but reading threads about barriers to Lemmy/Fediverse uptake, I tended to agree it’s a step that the general public aren’t used to, and it’s an unnecessary barrier most of the time.
I know (from the Beehaw matrix chat) that they have started rejecting users as they are growing too fast and have an image in mind of what they want their community to be like. Probably if we get lots of new users joining all of a sudden then I’ll need to turn on sign-up approvals for a while. That lets us add people at a level we can handle.
From what I’ve heard, the database CPU usage is the biggest bottleneck for larger instances. I’m actually seeing higher CPU usage now, even though the site says 0 users online. Still less than 50% CPU usage though.
Edit: If I view from the homepage it says 7 users online. Perhaps this is why there’s higher CPU usage.
Edit from 3 days later: we’ve had 30 users online and CPU under 20% so maybe it was higher because of a background job or a bunch of logged out users.
