Hey folks! I’m responsible for servers at lemm.ee.

For general lemm.ee policy/admin/moderation topics, please contact @[email protected]

  • 70 Posts
  • 751 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Hey, for the past few weeks, we have been tuning different rate limits and other bot prevention mechanisms on lemm.ee. We have had a huge increase in traffic lately, as well as a couple of instances of what was effectively a DDoS.

    In other words, the problems likely have nothing to do with your app or different versions, and everything to do with our own measures.

    For the mark post as read endpoint, I recently made the rate limit a bit more relaxed, so hopefully users won’t see issues there anymore. OTOH, we are also presenting a Cloudflare challenge for some IP ranges currently, which may inadvertently affect legit users. This was necessary to mitigate a recent DDoS, but we will continue tuning and hopefully restore things to normal for legit users soon.





  • In my experience, it’s mostly a combination of confusing Lemmy UI + user error:

    1. When using the e-mail verification link, Lemmy just shows a blank page with a tiny “e-mail verified” notification in the bottom left corner, which people miss. They then assume that it didn’t work, because all they see is a blank page.
    2. When opening the e-mail verification link multiple times, only the first time registers, and further attempts will generate confusing errors. This also makes people assume it didn’t work, but in reality, their e-mail got verified successfully.
    3. On lemm.ee, it’s very common for people to sign up with typos in their e-mail addresses (happens few times every week recently).
    4. We have a custom question on our sign-up page asking people to state they agree to our rules, and it’s relatively common that people just don’t read the question and write something random in there - we generally don’t accept such applications to try and weed out bots, but I’m pretty sure we also end up rejecting a bunch of legit users this way who just didn’t read the instructions.

    Generally I’m happy to provide support to people in such cases if they reach out to me directly, but at the end of the day, the easiest and fastest solution if the account is truly stuck in limbo is just to create another account.

    It’s a shame that there is so much potential friction on sign-up, but at the same time, I don’t see us reducing the friction on lemm.ee any time soon, because this is the lesser evil compared to bot sign-ups etc that we have seen in the past.




  • Thank you very much for the support!

    Our infrastructure costs are currently quite stable at around 200€ per month, and considering that the instance is right now quite decently supporting nearly 6000 monthly active users, you could say that you are indeed relatively contributing a ton - you are effectively covering server costs for 60 people!

    The fact that it’s a monthly amount is particularly great, because with recurring income, we will get advanced warning if there is danger of funds starting to run low.