Site will be down for the upgrade sometime today as I run the scripts we have and see what happens and then troubleshoot. Hopefully not too long.

Rule

FB Marketplace is a strange place.

Today on 22 April 2024 lemmy.myserv.one reached >99% uptime. We are also in the top 350 most reliable lemmy servers now as measured by this site: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list - currently on page 11 if sorted by uptime.

The server is also now almost 1 year old. It will be 1 year on June 2024. Thanks for sticking with us!

Next goal is top 100 servers and/or 99.5% uptime.

Thanks everyone:)

Disclaimer: Obviously this is for educational purposes only. I would personally never use my internet connection for anything illegal at all. I simply tested the below setup then deleted everything out of pure interest to understand how things worked and do not use any IPTV service. I love paying Netflix and other streaming platforms and will always support big companies and their profits.

So...

If you are like me and have a TV, and either a firestick or (in my case) an apple tv, where the users are used to just clicking with a remote into Netflix, switching to IPTV might be quite a struggle.

I have found what I now consider the perfect setup, easy enough for an 8 year old to use and required no intervention from users, no moaning "something has broken". Seamless and easy. Impossible? Not at all. And if you don't have an IPTV provider I can hook you up with one if you send me a DM message also (they have trials).

Requirements for this to work.

1. Access to cryptocurrency (Paypal is an option if privacy is not paramount).
2. An IPTV provider (aka discord access to organise IPTV service on the low - message me if you don't have one) .
3. An apple TV (or firestick) app to play the streams
4. A VPN to hide the traffic.
5. Bandwidth - about 50mbit would be ideal and more than enough.

All of the above can be paid for by Paypal if you don't want to use crypto, however if you require to be untraceable then you will need to use crypto for the IPTV and mullvad VPN part.

Costs:
Recommend not subscribing to anything more than 3 months at a time max. This is in case things break/get shut down and so on.

IPTV - I use a UK centric provider that costs £30 GBP every 3 months (Equivalent to 10 GBP a month). This gives live TV (sky), Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime and a few other bits and bobs in this price. You also get a backup stream so if the primary goes down you can still use your IPTV.

A TV app. You can either use UHF or Snappier IPTV. UHF costs 0.99 per month (recommend only subscribing monthly) and Snappier costs 1.99 per month. They have different layouts depending what you prefer. Both cost a nominal amount so suggest picking the one that's easier to use for you. I use UHF.

A VPN. I use mullvad. You will need a 1 time purchase on an app called passepartout on apple TV. This allows you to sync a VPN profile from your iPhone to the apple TV and ensure that when the Apple TV turns on it auto connects to your VPN. This hides your traffic and so on.

The basic setup:

Once you have organised getting your IPTV streams from a provider and have a VPN, then it is very straightforward. For mullvad you set a country exit point in the account. I just set the same country as I currently reside so the ping is low and speed is fast.

Setup Passpartout with your vpn provider and create a profile (Mullvad has an account number and the password "m"), sync this to Apple tv. Ensure apple tv can connect. Reboot and check it stays connected. The Apple tv is now secured for use of the service. Similar setup for a firestick I imagine (maybe you can add a vpn without this app I don't have a firestick to test with so am not 100% sure).

Next install an IPTV app like UHF and subscribe for 1 month @0.99.

Next add the playlist streams you have to UHF, and the app will have your sections of live tv, series and movies. The correct way to do this is add an Xtream playlist (M3U8 is an older style that I found had issues) and insert the URL, Username and Password.

Thats it, dead easy. Super reliable and so simple even kids can use it. There is no fiddling around, and no issues.

Just wanted to write this up as there was nothing when I was looking to test this for educational purposes. Now there is something written. And you can trial it too. Its not for everyone but maybe if you need something simple, and easy then give it a go :)

• T

Another apology to everyone.

I upgraded the instance to 0.19.1 today, and the upgrade unfortunately had a major issue. This caused the Database to become fairly broken and it has taken several hours to repair the damage and the database.

I have found the root cause of the issue and will be implementing some changes to the backup routine to avoid this issue in the future for future upgrades. This is thanks to some very welcome help from the admins on the Beehaw instance who are incredible and supportive.

As a result this will be improved and shouldnt happen again in the future when upgrading. I still need to run a vacuum on the postgres database but I will do this tomorrow, but there will be a 15 minute window tomorrow when the site is unresponsive while this is run.

Hopefully after that there are no more issues and the site can finally come back to being reliable again.

Kind regards,

• P

Unfortunately the server went offline today for approximately 12 hours. This is due to a deficiency in the backup routine, where if the vps hoster I use turns off the server/has an interruption, during the window of about 30 minutes where the backup runs then the script does not put everything back in place to ensure the server can start up again.

The good news is, this new issue that was not thought about should be resolvable with a reboot script, that uses an if or statement to check if the backup did do what it was supposed to and if not take some fairly simple logic to put things back as they should be.

In the next couple of weeks I will implement and test such a solution.

However it does raise another issue in that lemmy had some growth and then shrinking, that has stabilised and left us with a constant but slow increase in users, lost some of the admins that used to help check this server and they have abandoned their lemmy deployments for whatever reason and there are less people around actually checking of things are working.

Sadly I didnt notice the server was offline for 12 hours as I was working and in meetings all day and only got around to checking lemmy later in the afternoon. This is disappointing as the fix only took a few minutes - less than 10 to login, check what happened and correct it.

Had I been made aware of an issue earlier, many hours of downtime would have been saved.

To be clear, this server is run extremely cheaply. This means we dont have as many automated checks as other more expensive lemmy servers and we must rely on our members to tell us if things go wrong. This design choice was chosen in case lemmy becomes less popular and so the cost of the server is no issue. Essentially I can pay and run it out of my pocket just as a public service.

What would be great is if anyone can join the admin team to do some actual man hours work like, respond to new users joining the server, checking its functional and messaging me if not, blocking a user here or there if we get a complaint and so on. All of these tasks have become harder as the admins we used to rely on together have lost interest.

Finally if nobody is able to help, and the expectation is this simply continues as is for free indefinitely then that is totally fine also. The server is in no danger of being turned off or anything like that, requests and issues that come up will just take longer to be fixed as a result. To be clear I dont mind, if I cant use the lemmy server I just login to it and fix it and then carry on my merry way. This mostly affects people who cant do that.

Just wanted to make an appeal for some admins to improve the areas we are weakest but also clarify nobody is under and obligation to do anything and the server remains free regardless. The weakest area is not enough humans helping by messaging and opening communication lines if there are issues. If you can type a message and send it to someone, use this server and want to make it better then you are qualified to help.

Any help is of course greatly appreciated. My commitment is that you will never be expected to do anything to ‘keep it going’ but I also sleep, work, and so on so this is why I am asking. Totally up to whatever anyone feels comfortable with. Zero obligations.

Thanks -P

A short while ago I asked about a youtube alternative. While I was happy to try odyssey a small subset of commenters here were fairly cynical that any solution could be developed that could challenge a big company like YT and some even suggested just paying google.

This is the original question: https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/3116340

I am now happy to learn that in fact a solution has been developed which I will be trying. In fact it is presented in a YT video: https://youtu.be/5DePDzfyWkw?si=eMGHNGsxICcLmFOW

It warms my heart to see that solutions you difficult problems can be found and that we as thinking people and as humans still have the ultimate ability to change the course of the ship. I will be giving this new video app a try that similar to the messenger apps looks like it has a chance to begin the slow eroding of a single entity having all the content. Many years I am sure but feel like my question was answered even if not on Lemmy.

Thanks everyone:)

Looks like its over for me and youtube. Being told I cant watch because of an ad blocker.

Where is everyone moving to and using instead of youtube? I will just move to the same place.

Its time to share the wiki and get your friends on board the ship as we set sail. We all have to rally together to stop the neverending subscription model.

Give them this map; its all the booty they need: https://rentry.co/megathread

Maybe some of you can speed it along so we can see what it is.