A few weeks passed since my last update, but MaiionChat is now upgraded to Lemmy instance v0.18.3. The upgrade was quick and seamless in the virtual environment with a smaller test database. As expected, the upgrade for the live site was also quick. Aside from the server’s CPU resources maxing out processing the much larger postgres database for only the first 3 minutes, everything else was also seamless. The server continues to run as usual, and utilizes slightly less memory compared to previous versions. Release information can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases/tag/0.18.3

For the sake of transparency, I would like to mention the customizations and additions I made to the instance leading to the v0.18.3 upgrade.

There was a time when this instance did not have picture previews or open graph images (og:image). This was a decision I made initially to prevent the server’s space from running out. Aside from the occasional image links, the text only experience got old. Due to that, I enabled image previews on July 14th, and monitored the server usage until July 21st.

During that time, I found out that it took 3 days for the “pictrs” folder to match the size of the “postgres” database folder. At the rate the “pictrs” folder was growing, the server would have no more room after a few months. I did not want to disable picture previews, so I just made a bash script that deletes all pictures after 2 days and runs via cron schedule. If you go to any local community, and go to posts older than 2 days, you will see that most, if not all picture previews are gone.

Still on the topic of pictures, I noticed that activating picture previews added more traffic to this instance. Trying to take advantage of the opportunity, I did a little bit of promotion on another instance, and community subscriptions significantly increased despite the lack of comments on my post. However, my promotion introduced a few trolls who created accounts to deliberately break rule 4 and posted NSFW content. I decided to ban the accounts instead of purging them from the database like I did with the wave of bot accounts from a while ago. The NSFW content that were deliberately posted in the wrong communities were completely purged from the database.

On the topic of the database, I previously learned in an older post that the activity table consumes plenty of server space. What I did in that older post was manual. Since then, I have cleaned the database automatically with another bash script that runs via cron schedule. The bash script will clean the activity table of content older than 1 day every day. Upon setting this, I noticed that if you view the “All” feed and filter by “Active”, most of the oldest content will be from 2 days ago. Before this, the “Active” filter had content as old as 1 week. Now, the “Active” filter seems to show the active content up to 2 days.

Please be aware that all these changes were made under v0.18.2

Lastly, since community subscriptions are increasing, I have made the bot, u/QualityControl, a moderator for all the communities. The source code of this bot can be found here: https://github.com/Dakkaron/SquareModBot. I have it filtering unwanted links to Reddit, and I will expand the filter as needed.

My apologies if any of these changes will potentially or have already caused inconveniences to lurkers and existing users.

Edit: Spelling & Grammar