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


  • Elsewhere: me.lemmy.zip - See my accounts across the internet
  • 5 posts
  • 8 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

Hello all!

To celebrate Lemmy.zip turning 3 years old, we are once again hosting a small giveaway to say thank you for being here ❤️

We’re giving away 3 prizes to 3 lucky winners. This will be 1 x £25 Steam gifts, and 2 x £10 Steam gifts.

The giveaway will be open for 48 hours from 18:00 UTC on the 10th June 2026, to 18:00 UTC on the 12th June 2026. This thread will unlock at 18:00 UTC :)

You can enter by making a comment in this very thread! Your comment can say or be absolutely anything you want (within reason!)

Once you’ve made a comment, you should get a message back from ZippyBot confirming you’ve entered and a ticket number. For transparency, at the end of this we’ll publish the entry list and ticket numbers.

You must be a Lemmy.zip OR a Piefed.zip user to enter (comments from anyone else will be ignored!) and you will need a Steam account and be happy to send me your username so I can gift you the value via Steam. Your Lemmy.zip/Piefed.zip account must have been created before the 9th June 2026.

At the end of the giveaway, I’ll lock the thread and Zippy will pull three random entries. The first username pulled will win the first prize (£25), and the other two users will win the other prizes (£10).

(EDIT: Thanks to @Thordros@hexbear.net there is now a 4th place prize of £10!)

I’ve put a few FAQs in this spoiler tag if you want to know more:


FAQs - PLEASE READ!

FAQs
  • Q) Can anyone enter?
  • A) You must be a lemmy.zip user or a Piefed.zip user, have a steam account, and your account must have been created before 9th June 2026

  • Q) Can I have a giftcard for a different platform, i.e. xbox or playstation?
  • A) Unfortunately not. Those platforms (to my knowledge) don’t allow me to purchase a giftcard in the UK and you activate it anywhere in the world. Steam allows currency conversion on gifts.

  • Q) How quickly will I get my prize?
  • A) Steam requires that someone must be on a user’s friend list for 3 days before giftcards can be sent, therefore I will share my Steam profile with the winners (or vice versa) and after 3 days of being friends on Steam, I will send the gift over. (Unless you live in the UK, in which case I can send you a code within 24 hours)

  • Q) I think my entry was valid, but I didn’t get a reply from Zippybot with my ticket number. What do I do?
  • A) Send me a message asap! You can try commenting again too.

  • Q) Are user donations funding this?
  • A) No, just making it clear here that the donations to Lemmy.zip and PIefed.zip only ever go towards the server and Lemmy.zip infrastructure. The funds for this are coming from my wallet :)

  • Q) How does Zippy select the winners?
  • A) Zippy randomly shuffles the list of entrants in the DB. It then randomly shuffles the list again in Python. Then it randomly selects 3 winners from that double shuffled list.

  • Q) What if something goes wrong?
  • A) If for any reason something goes wrong during the giveaway, it will be paused until it can be resumed. If too much time lapses, the giveaway will be restarted.

3 years ago today Lemmy.zip was created, and what a journey it has been!

I never thought it would grow beyond a few users, and that it would probably crash and burn after I inevitably broke something.

Amazingly, we’re still here and now the 3rd most active Lemmy server!

To celebrate, I’ve pulled together a recap of everyone’s time on Lemmy.zip - you can view yours at recap.lemmy.zip!

I want to say a big thank you to the admin team v4ld1z, gazby, and INeedMana for helping me to keep things running, and to all the moderators who take take the time to build and foster their communities.

I also want to thank you, the reader, for being part of Lemmy.zip. Without you, this would all be rather pointless!

Demigodrick

Hear ye, hear ye! Gather round the lantern, settle yourselves by the fire, and let me regale you with the tale of the past month’s goings-on. There have been victories, mishaps, curious discoveries, and perhaps even a little bit of chaos. Actually it was pretty much just chaos.


Server updates

DotZip turns 3 years old on June 10th! To be more precise, Lemmy.zip turns 3 years old but we’re gonna use that as our official birthday across our sites. Piefed.zip turns 1 year old just 3 days later, so it’s close enough we’ll use it as our birthday date :)

We’ll have some birthday celebrations taking place, plus a cool little mini-site (we had these in Year 1 and Year 2 so we’ll keep the tradition going, although it will be slightly different this year!


Piefed took its turn at being the problem-instance for once, and caused some major headaches. Very unlike Piefed, which is normally the well behaved child instance.

A user disclosed publicly some vulnerabilities in Piefed that could be exploited, into a lemmy community without notifying the developer first of this. As this could then be used by anyone to exploit piefed instances, a number of Piefed admins including us took our Piefed instances offline until the fixes could be pushed. During this time, some further exploits were shared which indicated that the instance needed to stay offline longer, including the ability for any account to ban any other account without authentication. As this could be used to target vulnerable users, we held Piefed.zip offline a bit longer until these fixes were pushed too.

Thankfully all fixes were pushed in about 24 hours, and the site is back up, but it does show the impact on instances when disclosures are made improperly. The vulnerabilities were also all discovered by having an LLM scan the codebase, which probably indicates where we’re at as a society right now, and that anyone developing code probably needs to do this to make sure someone doesn’t beat them to it.

Thankfully it doesn’t appear any real damage was done!


After last month’s Lemmy drama with nested comments, Lemmy.zip has taken its turn being well behaved and I don’t have too much to say here. The Lemmy 1.0 beta is out and in testing, so hopefully not too long before we’re able to upgrade and get all the cool new features.


Please Don’t Be a Lurker!

If you’re new here - WELCOME! I hope you’re enjoying your time here :)

Just one small teeny-tiny request. The greatest gift you can give Lemmy.zip and Piefed.zip isn’t money, praise, or a signed copy of your self-published autobiography… maybe. Its participation.

Upvote the things you like. Start a discussion, debate, or feed all my posts to an LLM and see how long it would take people to realise I’ve been replaced by a machine. Make new communities if you don’t see one that fits your oddly specific niche obsession. (We don’t judge. Well, we try not to judge anyway.)

The fediverse naturally ebbs and flows, tides of people come and go. But if you’ve found yourself oddly attached to this strange little corner of the internet? Wonderful. Help it breathe. Help it grow. Help it be just a tiny bit weirder in the best possible way.

So if you’ve gone to the effort of clicking Sign Up and proving you’re not a robot (unless you are, in which case hello and welcome to our new AI overlords), then please, I beg of you:

Stick around. Add your voice. It really does make this place better.


Donations

Want to support us? We have a range of donation options to suit you!

Liberpay (Card, Paypal)

Liberpay is our newest donation method. You can donate with Paypal or with a card. The link is https://liberapay.com/dotzip

OpenCollective (Card)

Our classic donation option, but only supports card payments. The link is https://opencollective.com/lemmyzip

Open Collective backers

If you’re enjoying Lemmy.zip or Piefed.zip, please check out the OpenCollective page, we have a selection of one-off or recurring donation options. All funds go directly to hosting the sites and keeping the virtual lights on.

Ko-Fi (Card, Paypal)

We also have our Ko-Fi page if you’d rather use this site, which also supports Paypal and Card payments.

Thank you!

We continue to have some really kind and generous donators and I can’t express my thanks enough. You can see all the kind donators in the Thank You thread - you could get your name in there too!


Graphs

Piefed.zip

CPU over 7 days:

RAM:

Performance right now:

Image storage:

Cloudflare overview:

Requests:

Bandwidth:

Visitors:

Traffic:

Lemmy.zip

CPU:

RAM:

Disk space:

Performance right now:

Images:

Cloudflare overview:

Requests:

Bandwidth:

Visitors:

Traffic:


And that’s it for another month.

Remember, DotZip’s birthday is on the 10th June (only 10 days from today!) so do keep an eye out for the celebrations. You can usually win some games or giftcards or something if I’m feeling generous :)

Speak soon!

Demigodrick

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/14012800

https://canvas.fediverse.events/

July 18th (4am UTC) to July 20th (also 4am UTC)

Canvas 2026 is in roughly 60 days!

Canvas is an annual event hosted for the Fediverse, allowing everyone to contribute to a pixel canvas, one pixel at a time

Check out the website for a live countdown, login testing, chat room (matrix/discord), and what last year’s Canvas was!


If you are a developer, check out the source, and if you’re a Fediverse app dev check the docs to add Canvas functionality to your app 👀

Here is a thread to celebrate those who support Lemmy.zip to keep the (virtual) lights on and the data flowing!

If you’d like to donate and get your name on this list, head over to OpenCollective and select one of the options.

There is absolutely no pressure to donate though. Anything you can give is spent on keeping Lemmy.zip going.

Lemmy.zip Donators (Past or Present)

Lemmy.zip Supporters

Lemmy.zip Friends

Lemmy.zip Heroes

Thank you again to everyone who is (or has been) supporting Lemmy.zip.

Perks!

Donators get some special perks - including the ability to choose custom emojis for everyone to use, and to get their own me.lemmy.zip profile - just like this one.

In the future, we’re looking at other ways to reward those who donate. If there is something you’d like to see as a reward, let the admin team know.

If you’d like to stay anonymous please email me at hello@lemmy.zip or send me a message on here :)

  • This has definitely been a problem with communities being created on the bigger instances and not utilising smaller instances. Happy for someone to say I’m wrong etc, but I think there would be merit in capping instances to x number of users or communities, to force the user base to spread out.

    Also, the way signups work, (ie you find a community you like then click sign up but that signs you up to that instance), further exacerbates the issue and the confusion around how federation works. The sign up links on each instance should lead either to a page with an instance finder, or to a random instance that matches the profile of, and is already federated with, the instance you were on. Otherwise the larger instances have a monopoly and are just going to lead to a bad user experience when they can’t cope with the traffic.

    It’s a self defeating prophecy if users only want to sign up to the instances with the big communities, because then everyone is going to keep creating communities there and nobody is going to want to join a smaller instance.

    I might be talking nonsense and am happy to be told why that is all wrong :)