Meta

Yes, its been a while since I did one of these... over a year.. oops!.

For something different, I'll post the graphs for the last 12 months, with some explanatory comments.
Feel free to ask question, will do my best to answer.

Finances:
Short version, AZ is costing ~$90 AUD per month to run on current hardware and services. That is partially covered by a small handful of monthly supporters, around $25 per month. The rest is covered by me personally. If you'd like to help cover server costs, any amount is appreciated: https://ko-fi.com/lodion

CPU:

The decrease in August across multiple graphs is due to the AI scraping blocking we put in place. At the time they were effectively DDoSing AZ... since then, I've not heard of any major issues.

Memory:

~~We're overdue for a lemmy software upgrade to 0.19.13, which should clear out the heavy swap usage. I'll do that tonight... if I remember.~~ Edit: post upgrade, swap freed up.

Network:
As with other graphs, a drop in egress traffic when we blocked AI bots.

Storage:

Cloudflare (30 days):

Cloudflare saving us loads of egress traffic every month, and protecting the site from AI bots. If we weren't using Cloudflare, I don't think AZ would exist as it does today.

I know - you're very probably already sixteen. That's why we are here.

If you've managed to miss the coming change in the law, I envy you. This silly law has taken up several hours of my year that could have been spent doing something more productive like watching Golden Girls.

But, the law is here now and we need to take "Reasonable Steps" to ensure that everyone is over sixteen. If you are wondering what "reasonable steps" is, then join the club. Nobody really knows. What I do know is that we have to start to make an effort to be sure that no young'uns are here against the law.

To that end, we have hired a helpful bot called Molly. She's an expert at being sixteen and she's just been told that it's her job is to verify all your ages. Here she is:

What's next? Well, in the first phase we ask that you drop her a Message that verifies you are over 16. She doesn't want to see your government ID. Some ideas that she would accept are:

1. A passenger takes a photo of your username on a sheet of paper with you driving (please don't make this one a selfie). Faces not required.
2. A photo of your username with a glass of alcohol at a bar.
3. A convincing spiel that would only come from someone older than sixteen (Can you tell Molly who Samantha is?). Can you tell her about the Breakfast Club that only 70's/80's kids from Queensland would know?
4. Anything else you can think of that only someone over sixteen could/would do.

There's no need to spend a lot of time on this. At this point, I'll go through the users who have messaged her and compile a list of people who have verified their age. You can be creative. Just be aware that there's an infinitesimal chance (but not zero) that whatever you send may be sent to some government agency to demonstrate that we are complying with the law.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. How do you know that the user isn't faking their submission? I don't. No method is perfect, we saw kids defeating intricate and expensive verification systems earlier this year. Kids are smart.
2. How do you stop a kid from moving their account to one of the thousands of non-Australian Lemmy Instances and just continuing on with their day? I can't. The fact that the law is totally ineffectual in the context of Lemmy is beside the point. We clearly meet the definition of a Social Media platform according to the law, and we are based in Australia. So we have to comply, even if it is pointless.
3. Are you aware that this is pointless and kids are going to get around it? I know that teenage-me sure would have. But again, that's beside the point. We need to comply with the law.
4. Will you accept a photo of me in my undies? Ok, this one isn't frequent from previous discussions on the law, but I wanted to include it in case. Please don't send NSFW photos to show you are over age.

Just looking at !news@lemmy.world and I noticed none of the recent posts have any comments, but when viewed from that instance there are many comments and votes.

As I'm sure several people noticed, we had an outage this morning. The cause was the aussie.zone SSL certificate expiring.

That's not supposed to happen, certbot and letsencrypt are supposed to handle that renewal automatically without bothering a human. I'll add some sort of monitor on the certbot log to look for errors and notify me going forward.

It also occurred to me that while my unofficial policy in the event of an outage is to make a post from my aus.social mastodon account, I haven't exactly communicated this to anyone. Nor have I communicated that I'll get a notification pretty quickly if you @ me there.

If the site is down for more than 10 minutes and I haven't made a post on aus.social about it, I probably don't know about the outage. Feel free to ping me on mastodon to bring it to my attention.

Hi there, I'd like to request a community about bonzai plants please.

I don't have a name for it, I guess just "bonzai" would suit but if you have something more creative then please bring it to the party.

I know other instances have grown a lot due to media attention, reddit making silly decisions or banning communities. Did anything similar happen or is this just a thing that thinged?

Edit: having a closer look, some of the names I thought were new are people who've had accounts for years but have mostly been posting to other instances so I didn't see them. So maybe I'm only seeing them on higher-scoring local posts

Guidance has been released.

I guess this'll be the first concrete information we have to go on for the implementation and what it might mean for AZ.

What is up with u/dwazoup which is undoubtedly the same as what was u/davriellelouna, and seems to be the same as what was u/davriel?

That last account was around for a few hours on Sunday the 7th, until i asked whats up with the username change, within minutes the u/davriel account had been deleted. It was like 9 minutes after that comment.

These accounts have been shutdown/deleted and subsequently launched in the last day, but back to the samr patter of spammy behaviour, relying largely on large media outlets. (Although, i will say this time theres some more obacure content, like a random picture of a festival goer.)

So whats up with this? Is this an actual person's account with some sort of script attached to post from a list of media outlets? The number of posts from this account is huge.

Is it some kind of AI generator? Because i have seen comments, that seem rational although a little hypocritical.

And finally, why does it/they keep deleting accounts and restrlarting them? Its not exactly hard to spot their new username.

Holy crap, there is lemmy but with categories combining many communities:

https://piefed.social/topic/gaming

I hate having to choose between visiting each community individually or seeing all my subscriptions in one place (I'm not always in the mood for news and gaming and memes and niche cartoons and soil science).

Took a while to find the sourcecode , for some reason my search engine doesn't want to show codeberg:

PieFed A Lemmy/Mbin alternative written in Python with Flask.

• Clean, simple code that is easy to understand and contribute to. No fancy design patterns or algorithms.
• Easy setup, easy to manage - few dependencies and extra software required.
• AGPL.
• First class moderation tools.

Feels like lemmy. Smells like lemmy. Talks like lemmy. Technically isn't a 'variant' but an 'alternative' because the code isn't a fork, but from my lazy ass user perspective it's totally a variant.

Image vs link posts are more clearly presented too. On lemmy I have to squint at the icon in the corner of an image to work out if clicking on it will make it bigger or take me to a different website. Inconsistent and fiddly, especially when I'm tired.

Anyone here tried hosting it and can comment on whether it's a PITA or not? It's an interpreted language so the presumption is it would be crap, but for all I know it might have a better architecture that makes up for it.

Also, would I be considered an aussie.zone traitor if I started using https://piefed.au/ more? Anyone know the people running it to make sure they're not secretly kiwis?

Hello admins and users of Meta. I'd like permission to use this instance to create a rather unsavoury community that is akin to /r/mordbidreality on Reddit.

It will be a community that is R18+, NSFL, with content focused on gore and death, and a strong emphasis on medical and philosophical discussion.

I'm still considering how it will be managed because it will contain extremely shocking and distressing content of the dead and dying.

I will moderate it very seriously, with strict rules and minimal humour on the subject matter. Political discussions and topics will be avoided and kept at an absolute minimum, meaning no largely controversial topics such as Israel/Palestine, just because of how volatile it is. I was thinking of creating a 'No active conflict' rule, but I'm unsure whether to include Ukraine, as it has some incredibly fascinating trauma first aid videos from a combat medic's perspective, along with some remarkable footage.

Naturally, such a community will be very distressing to view or accidentally stumble upon, which is why I'm asking for permission to create it.

Thank you.

@lodion@aussie.zone

Hello admins and users of Meta. I'd like permission to use this instance to create a rather unsavoury community that is akin to /r/mordbidreality on Reddit.

It will be a community that is R18+, NSFL, with content focused on gore and death, and a strong emphasis on medical and philosophical discussion.

I'm still considering how it will be managed because it will contain extremely shocking and distressing content of the dead and dying.

I will moderate it very seriously, with very strong rules about little-to-no humour on the subject matter. No largely controversial political posts are allowed, such as Israel/Palestine, just because of how volatile it is. I'm not sure whether or not to include Ukraine, as Ukraine does have some incredibly fascinating trauma first aid videos from a combat medic's perspective, among some incredible footage.

Naturally, such a community will be very distressing to view or accidentally stumble upon, which is why I'm asking for permission to create it.

Thank you.

@lodion@aussie.zone

This link is for if people here are interested in an idea i've had. I'd love you all to have a read and see what you think. Cheers.

Seeing what appears to be a distributed scrape or AZ coming from multiple network from multiple overseas locations. From what I can tell predominantly bon English speaking countries.

I've had to be pretty heavy handed with the catpcha challenges for those countries for now. It seems to have helped, will keep an eye on things. Hopefully not too much collateral damage to legitimate users....

Seems to have been more malicious traffic today, causing issues for the site. I've put a block in place, which seems to have helped.
I'll keep an eye on it.

saw it getting cloudflare error pages yesterday, just straight up not loading anything right now

everything ok?

We had a couple of reports today of vote manipulation happening in the Australia community. After investigating, I'm seeing a trend:

https://aussie.zone/post/21203876
https://aussie.zone/post/21124048
https://aussie.zone/post/21194319
https://aussie.zone/post/21130833

The votes in all these posts look like this. In this example, only two of the downvotes look legitimate. The rest are coming from three instances that don't appear to be real Lemmy sites. One of them doesn't even resolve.

We've seen some issues with AZ again today. On investigating it looks like more DDOS/abuse traffic from overseas. I've applied the same sort of block as last time we saw this, and things appear to have returned to normal..

The sharp drop is when the "attack" started, the jump is when it was blocked... the red line is blocked requests.

I love putting things in boxes, it's my hobby you see, so I'd like to hear other people's thoughts and perspectives on this.

But my point is pretty straightforward: there is an overarching aussie.zone community, and as long as the sidebars are well-connected to aid discovery (and they're already pretty good), there's no point in having news and politics spread across three different communities, and we just end up with redundant crossposting creating parallel conversations.

It would be great to clarify the relationship between /c/australia, /c/news and /c/australianpolitics.

Hi, hoping to find out where to report this error. I tried to subscribe to https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy Entered aussie.zone at the prompt and I got a single line response "Server error". I seem to have subscribed to other communities on lemmy.ml successfully. Thanks!

https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=lemmy.world&var-remote_instance=aussie.zone&from=now-7d&to=now

Cheers to the admins :)

Lemmy 0.19.11 (which I've just upgraded AZ to) has a new feature to allow regular federation, but require users be logged in to view content.

I'd like to gauge feedback from users on this. It will not add privacy, or limit the propagation of posts/comments etc. But it will limit AZ server resource consumption by bots or users that are not logged in.

Thoughts/concerns on enabling this feature?

Update: thank you all for your thoughts and feedback on this. We'll leave AZ as it is, though may use this feature in future if we need to mitigate attacks or other malicious traffic.

Hi, I am new here! I have some newbie observations and suggestions, hope it's ok to post them here. It would be great to make high profile communities more obvious on the Aussie Zone home page e.g. on side bar, like they appear when viewing a post. Is this the place to chat about that?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27361885

Just figured I’d share this here for informational purposes.

Not entirely clear to me what is going on, but we've seen a large influx in traffic from oversea today. This has lead to high CPU and performance issues.

I've put in place a block to what seems to be the source of the traffic, but its not perfect and may cause other issues. If you see/hear of any please let me know here.