Hello Everyone, I would like to wish everyone a happy New Year period where we’ve decided as a human race to stop working and start enjoying spending copious amounts of money on loved ones, items for ourselves, or just relishing the time to relax and recuperate.
Whatever your desired state of mind while the New Year period is we at Reddthat hope you enjoy it!

Community Funding

First up, I’d like to thank our dedicated community members who keep the lights on. Knowing that together we are creating a little home on the internet pleases me to no end. Thankyou!
A special mention to our first time contributors as well. Welcome to Reddthat: Ashley & Guest!

If you are new to Reddthat and have not seen our OpenCollective page it is available over here. All transactions and expenses are completely transparent. If you donate and leave your name you’ll eventually find your way into our main funding post over here

User Statistics

As some of you might know, the Lemmy-verse is not populated as it once was back when people were thinking of a max-exodus. But do not be dismayed! These graphs show the dedication of our userbase rather than a dying platform.
These lines are replicated across all of the biggest instances not just our own. If you are interested checkout Fediverse Observer who I borrowed these graphs from. Thank-you!

I’m proud to know that over 250 people are using the services we provide & I hope you are enjoying it too!

A rise of close to 5000 comments MoM goes to show that we have a healthy amount of users in the fediverse who are actively interacting and communicating.

Users

Posts/Comments

Server Stability (Maintenance Windows) & Future Plans

The server has been rock solid the past month(s) since the last update. Except for 2 unscheduled outages, one when our hosting provider restarted the underlying host. This was during their weekly maintenance window so I can’t be completely mad at them and was due to them finishing migrating everything between the old host we were on.

For everyone’s information, the maintenance windows are: (UTC)

• Friday nights – 22:00 to 01:00
• Tuesday afternoons – 12:00 to 16:00

The majority of the time you will never see downtime during these periods but if you do happen to see high load times or error pages, that will be the cause. Due to the nature of this, I also perform maintenance during these periods such as system updates.

Dedicated server?

Our eventual plan was to always purchase a dedicated server with a beefy CPU & NVMe drive to enable us to do 3 things:

• Provide fast database queries to reduce latency and give a snappy experience
• On-demand support for encoding videos to allow you to post video memes
• Allow for growth to over 10k active users per month

Black Friday/Cyber Monday not withstanding, dedicated servers cost on average A$150-200/m. You can get better deals with other providers but for budgeting wise it is a good range.

With the bots leaving and some people deciding federated platforms were not right for them, the decisions are answered for us. While it would be good to provide a slightly faster experience, or be able to withstand over 10k active users per day, we are not there yet.
Our current solutions have growing room for the foreseeable future and until we outgrow our server it seems prudent not willingly waste money.

We have always been community funded and the trust that you have given us to make the best call for our future is something that I will not squander.

Lemmy v0.19 & Pictrs v0.5 features (coming soon)

The new version of Lemmy is getting closer and closer to being ready for fediverse-wide adoption for everyone to use (as in next week!). As previously stated in our October update there will be teething issues for those with 2FA but we are here for you.

Pictrs (the app which processes all the pictures/memes/gifs/videos) is due to release 0.5 soon as well. Which brings with it new database support, specifically postgres. This is the same database which Lemmy runs on, which means all Lemmy server admins will be able to run multiple pictrs instances to provide faster images, handle greater concurrent uploads, and if all goes well, less transcoding of supported videos.

Once the Lemmy and Pictrs versions come out we will be performing the maintenance required to update during the maintenance periods listed above. If everything goes well with lemmy.ml’s rollout (see here) we’ll schedule a maintenance period. (I’m eyeing off the 8th of December currently)

Closing

Reddthat is constantly seeing new members sign-up though our new application process. Since implementing applications have gone from an abysmal 40% success rate to over a 90% success.
Welcome to all these new members and maybe today will be your first post or comment!

Cheers,
Tiff
On behalf of the Reddthat Admin Team.