Lemmy.zip owner & admin
Contact me via hello@lemmy.zip


  • Elsewhere: me.lemmy.zip - See my accounts across the internet
  • 345 Posts
  • 731 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It’s a little hard to give exact costs for both instances as a whole, because they share infrastructure (i.e. shared email host is one cost across both) but the server itself for Lemmy is just under 50 euros a month, plus image storage at another 15/16 USD per month (with around 2TB of images). The smaller piefed server is more in the region of 25 euros a month, with images more in the 5/10USD range. Then domain on top of that. It’s not “expensive” as such, but it is time-heavy.




  • We have an extra layer of complexity with Lemmy.zip because we have NSFW images, and there is no way in lemmy for me to prevent UK users (or under 18s) from seeing that content if they sign up.

    Having NSFW means I need to have “highly effective” age verification in place, regardless of size, which I am obviously not going to do (I dont believe in it for a start, but also its incredibly expensive). If I turn NSFW off, like feddit.uk have, then I could do a risk assessment and all would be well, but then we’d lose things like spoilers in post images (because that functionality doesn’t exist yet) and any risque art communities etc.

    I’d also have to proactively scan everything to ensure it wasn’t NSFW otherwise I could potentially be in breach of the OSA - that level of monitoring for a couple of volunteers just isn’t worth it unfortunately!




  • In terms of the OSA, there is already detection in place for UK IP addresses to prevent them connecting to the site and instead forward them to uk.lemmy.zip - I will at some point need to do the same for Piefed. This takes the sites outside of the OSA so I dont need to comply. The data is all hosted in the EU but having the misfortune to be a UK citizen myself I need to take that extra step.

    In terms of the memory, its a bit misleading because the lemmy server is by far our most powerful, so we run a bunch of other stuff on there too, including backend admin tools, Oauth, grafana, matrix etc. So memory consumption will be much higher. Lemmy i think is a bit more performant than piefed but only anedotally, I dont have the comparison to back that up.



  • I’m more comfortable with Lemmy because I’ve been doing it 3 times longer than piefed, built all my own custom bot stuff, and had to get comfortable with the API. The admin side of things is also way simpler in my opinion, but Piefed offers a lot more in terms of customisation, such as plugins and custom built in pages. Pros and cons both ways to be honest. Piefed is also under very rapid development vs Lemmy which is very measured and tested. Again, pros and cons either way!

    I’m looking forward to both plugins and private communities in Lemmy 1.0!








  • Sure, lemmy.ml and lemmy.zip both use an image proxy, so we take a copy of the image from the remote server and give that to you instead of a direct link to the remote server (better for user privacy by stopping things like tracking pixels, ip leaks etc).

    In this case, it was an image from imgur that lemmy.ml was already proxying via the lemmy.ml server, which we were then trying to proxy from lemmy.ml. I’m not entirely sure what the issue is with lemmy.ml, but we’d appeared to have a rate limit and we couldn’t get a copy of that image from lemmy.ml. Instead, we now bypass the proxy from lemmy.ml and just serve their image from their proxy instead, as it’s already doing the exact same thing ours is. The trade off is that you have to visit lemmy.ml to get that image (same as you would for most other linked images on the web) but at least the image works.