There are a few topics about which the Based Count admin team would like to hear your thoughts as our community, before we take action. Instad of making various different posts we decided to condensate them into a single big announcement, feel free to speak your mind on any of the following topics. We encourage all Based Count users to participate, but we also welcome feedback from users of other instances.

Lemmy update

Earlier today we have updated our instance to the new 0.19.0 version, recently released by the lemmy developers.

Because of a previously undetected bug in the code of Kaleidoscope, our custom frontend, we had to temporarily disable user flairs and replace our user interface with the latest version of the legacy lemmy-ui. Kaleidoscope and user flairs will be re-activated in the next few days, as soon as we can solve the current problem.

Furthermore, according to some feedback we have received from administrators of other instances, there might still be some bugs in the new Lemmy release and it's possible that the server will feel a bit slower, due to some changes with how federation is handled. If you encounter any errors or issues, please use this thread to report them.

Threads.net

A few days ago, Meta's threads.net app launched in the European Union. Simultaneously, they also started testing integration with the Fediverse through ActivityPub. This reignited old talks about whether smaller instances like ours should federate with them or not. It should be noted that threads is pursuing a closer integration with microblogging platforms like Mastodon, rather than link aggregators like Lemmy. Also, it appears that Threads posts will at first be read only to federated servers. In other words, the Fediverse will be able to read content from Threads, but not the other way around.

Arguments FOR federation

• More content

Arguments AGAINST federation

• Privacy NIGHTMARE (it's literally Meta)
• Possible increased storage costs due to having to host additional content
• Risk of Meta pursuing an Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy, despite having denied such plans in the past.

We are currently defederated from threads.net due to privacy concerns, but we'd be open to reconsider this stance depending on community feedback.

Reddit reposting bots and alien.top

Another hot topic in the last few weeks was the alien.top instance and the Fediverser project. Its aim is pretty simple: creating digital bridges between Lemmy and Reddit to favour a migration of Reddit users to the Fediverse. This is mostly done by reposting Reddit posts to Lemmy lemmy communities through bots. An examples of this would be a bot reposting all content from r/PCM to our !pcm community.

Advantages

• This would solve the content drought that has caused many users to give up on Lemmy and move back to Reddit

Disadvantages

• Some percieve this as bot spam and have lamented the excessive amounts of bot posts in their feeds

Various instances have already defederated alien.top, including big players such as lemmy.world and feddit.de. What should our stance be? Would you like to see more posts in !pcm even if those posts were made by bots?

Example

Alternative frontends

We would like to enrich our instance by adding support for different user interfaces. Because our current UI features some changes from the OG Lemmy UI, adopting new frontends would require quite a lot of work on our end, to ensure features such as our very own user flairs work seamlessly on the new design.

Because of this, for the time being only one other client would support our custom features. Vote to decide your favourite

• Photon or its improved Tesseract variant (these are the two most complete UIs out there)
• An old Reddit-like design
• Alexandrite
• The Apple-like Voyager

Like some of you have already noticed, the instance has been down for the last week and a half. I documented the problem and the process of bringing it back online in a thread on our Discord, so if you are curious about that I'll redirect you there.

The TL;DR is that the instance ran out of disk space, so the database crashed. No database, no Lemmy.

I solved it by moving our 30GB of images to a separate, much cheaper storage (we moved from 3,00€ / month down to just 0,02€ / month for the image storage!), freeing up a bunch of space for the database. This should keep us going for a while and allow us to scale much better in the future.

The new host

The new image host we are using, is an object storage located on a separate machnie from the Lemmy server (while previously images resided on the same server as the database and the instance). Because of this, you are likely to experience some milliseconds of delay with the loading of new images, because some back and forth between Lemmy and the image server needs to happen before you can see it (Lemmy downloads the image, sends it to the image storage, image storage returns a link to the image to Lemmy, THEN you can see the image. It takes a while).

Next moves

While I'm on a roll with the Lemmy updates, later today I plan on updating our instance to version 0.18.5 of Lemmy. This should give us even more stability and better uptime in the future, but might temporarily break user flairs in [email protected].

I am terribly sorry for the prolonged downtimes and I really appreciated all the people who joined our Discord server asking if they could somehow help or simply showing care for our work on the instance.
Please remember that this is mostly a solo project of mine, where I am left handling both the server admin side as well as the community facing one. It's a lot for one guy to deal with, I'm sure you'll understand.

EDIT: I've succefully updated the instance, everything seems to be working fine. Let me know if something feels odd or buggy.

As you might have noticed, we've been experiencing repeated crashes and downtimes for the last 12 hours or so. This was because, after four long and tireless months, our storage drive had finally filled its 50GB capacity.

I noticed this today, at around 9:00 UTC and quickly took action. Fortunately we had already prepared a different partition with an additional 15GB ready for situations of this kind. It took me some additional 40 minutes of tinkering to move the database to said partition, but after that the instance was back online without any majour issues.

This is our current storage breakdown:

• Secondary partition (currently: 10 GB; max capacity: 15GB)

  • Database (postgres): 10GB

• Main partition (currently: 38GB; max capacity: 50GB)

  • Image hosting (pict-rs): 23GB
  • Lemmy executables, other services (Kaleidoscope, AutoMod, Flair) and operating system: 15GB

Of these, the only ones expected to grow are the database and the image hosting, with the latter being by far the fastest growing.

In the future we are considering moving pict-rs to a separate, more cost effective storage, however for the time being this should hold. We apologize for the disservice in the last hours.

Cheers and stay Based!

This is an update on the "Why is feddit.nl defederated" post by @[email protected] in [email protected].

Some time has passed and the admin appear to have gotten back control of his instance. Furthermore, I just noticed that AvaddonLFC (very active lemmy.world admin) has joined their admin team. This is more than enough for our criteria.
I have also withdrawn our censure against their instance on the Fediseer.

Here's hoping we'll be able to welcome many based Dutch people!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/475954

As anticipated a few days ago in our last announcement post, we are now rolling out user flairs for our instance.

At the moment they are only active in [email protected] , however they can also be enabled in other communities if the moderators desire it. Of course flairs aren't necessarily limited to the Political Compass. Mods (looking at you @[email protected] and @[email protected] ) can use them however they see fit.

For the next few days the only way to add, delete or modify them will be by kindly asking me (I need to manually edit the database), however I plan on bringing those features to the UI as soon as possible.

A couple more notes:

• flairs are only available and visible to users of this instance. Users from federated instances will look unflaired, you will look unflaired to them. It's just the way it goes, this service isn't part of the Lemmy server and thus doesn't federate.
• flairs are only available on the website. If you browse through an app you won't be able to see them either. Same reason as above.

Roadmap

There are some more updates to be made before we can say we are done with flairs:

• Adding mod tools to the UI (mod only window to create, edit and delete flairs in a community they moderate
• Adding limited support for other instances through a browser extension
• Porting flairchange_bot and basedcount_bot to [email protected] . Possibly other communities as well.

We don't have any plans for adding flairs support to mobile applications.

Hi everyone, sorry if the instance has been a bit dead lately. We've been hard at work on some new features! This is a small announcement post to bring you up to speed on what we've built thus far, as well as what's coming in the near future. Feel free to share your feedback!

NOTE: the following changes only apply to you if you view our instance from your web browser. If you usually browse from an app then this doesn't impact you.

TL;DR: we have published an update to the site which lays the groundwork for adding user flairs. Flairs will come in a few weeks.

While we are not quite yet ready to bring online our custom user flairs microservice (which is still in the final phases of its development), today I present to you Kaleidoscope, our very own fork of the lemmy-ui. It might not be very different from the previous UI at first glance, but it adds supports for the flairs microservice (meaning it will integrate and display user flairs seamlessly as soon as we add support for them), integrates various Fediseer features, includes an opt-in content filter to remove content posted by bad or untrusted actors from your feed and has a few other minor tweaks and fixes to things that bothered me in the legacy lemmy-ui.

But when are we getting flairs?

As I said the flairs backend is mostly done. It still needs some polish, which is why we aren't rolling it out today. We expect it to be ready and operational in a few weeks.

At first flairs will only be available to users from our instance and only through the website. We also have plans to add flair support to third party instances, through the download of a browser extension, but that will come at a later date. Our local users remain our top prioirty.

At the moment we don't plan on adding flairs support to any mobile app.

Is there anything bigger going on?

Yes! This is all in preparation to our official launch, which will feature multiple announcements on r/PCM and hopefully some people moving in from Reddit. Because of a deal we've made with the [email protected] mods and in particular @[email protected], the two conditions for this were:

• better mod tools (namely the AutoMod I built a short while ago)
• user flairs

After we are done with the flairs we'll start working on porting our two main bots, namely basedcount_bot and flairchange_bot.
We are also considering porting the long gone and dearly missed ChadGPT_bot, who had a very short lifespan of a few hours because of Reddit's patented literally 1984 moderation policy. Over here we'd be able to run it in a bit more relaxed environment, without having to worry about the thought police.

Some images

Content filter

Instance ratings

Flairs (coming soon)

We have been informed of another potential CSAM attack to our federated instance lemmy.ml.

After the events of the last time, I have preemptively and temporarily defederated us from lemmy.ml until the situation can be assessed with more clarity.

I have already deleted the suspicious posts (without looking at them myself, all from the database's command line) and banned the author. To the best of our knowledge, at no point in time any CSAM content was saved on our server.

EDIT: 2023-09-03 8:40 UTC

There have been no further reports of similar problems arising from lemmy.ml or other instances, so I am re enabling federation. Thank you for your patience.

Hey everyone,

I'm Atalocke, the quiet admin and owner of basedcount.com and this Lemmy instance. In regards to the recent incident, I've made the executive decision to change some site rules and update our Terms of Service (TOS).

These changes shouldn't really affect you, or how you use our services. They're more about protecting us from liability. The Based Count team is small, decentralized, and international. It's only a handful of developers all working for free in their spare time. We're no company, or even an official organization. These changes will allow us to better serve you, and expand how we can build communities together.

Our TOS now also encompasses our former rules. We still do not allow any content that is not legal in the United States. And, we're now also requiring all communities to have rules. These can be anything, as long as they do not break site rules or the Terms of Service. This means that if you're running an anarchy community you must create rules specifying that your community follows site rules and the TOS.

If you have any questions or concerns about rules, terms, or if you spot a violation, please feel free to message me anytime. For all other concerns, please contact Nerd02, as he is site manager, and is responsible for day-to-day operations of this instance.

We appreciate you guys, and want to keep this community available for as long as possible. Thank you for your patience the past few days and for persisting through the coming week.

Images posted within the last 48 hours will appear as broken. This is expected and intended.

Yesterday 2023-08-27 a community on the lemmy.world instance received multiple posts containing CSAM (or as it is more commonly known CP) content, which spread throughout the federation. We also ended up becoming involuntary hosts of said content.

Due to the severely limited nature of the Lemmy moderation tools, removing or purging the incriminated posts from the admin UI wasn't sufficient and didn't cause the images to be actually removed from our server. Because of this, a nuclear option was required. I have deleted every image saved by our server during the last 48 hours.

Unfortunately this also includes a post on [email protected] , as well as multiple posts on [email protected]. Authors of the affected posts can fix them by re-uploading their images, without the need to recreate the posts.

We are sorry for the inconvenience, but hosting CSAM content is highly illegal and we simply can't take any risks on this front.

I am currently discussing with the other admins whether further measures are necessary, to prevent this from happening in the future. We'll keep you posted if we have any updates.

EDIT [2023-08-28 10:00 UTC]:

The attack is still ongoing. I have now blocked the community and further deleted the last 15 minutes of images.

This is an update on our previous post. You can see it on one of our federated instances, such as sh.itjust.works.

To summarize, after last week's (10/07/2023) XSS attack, we wiped the site and decided to restore from a backup. Unfortunately all of our backups were corrupted and we had to recreate the instance on a fresh server and domain, otherwise Federation wouldn't have worked (blame it on the Lemmy devs, not us lol).

Anyway this should hopefully be it. The instance is back online here at lemmy.basedcount.com and will stay here for the forseeable future. I can't promise you I won't wipe the database again but I'll try my damn hardest not to.

While we were able to recover very little from our previous server, some data is still out there in our federated instances. For example, you can see a snapshot of the old [email protected] on lemmy.fbxl.net. If you'd like for us to manually recover any of that content feel free to ask, it's the least we can do. Know however that:

• images aren't recoverable. We can only extract text (comments and posts).
• it's an extremely lenghty process on our end. Do you really need it that badly?

To all of our previous users, we were able to recover a list of all the communities we used to be federated with. You can find it under lemmy.basedcount.com/communities. Just scroll through that list and hit follow to any community that interests you.

This should be everything, off to a new start. Thank you for sticking with us. Once again, we are terribly sorry for the data loss and the downtime.