There was downtime over the past 24 hours. You might not have noticed if you use an app, since the API stayed up the whole time.

We were getting swamped by a botnet. Tens of thousands of different IP addresses, each making only a couple of requests, crawling deep into old posts. That makes normal rate limiting useless. Anubis was challenging them, but at the difficulty we had it set to, the bots were solving those challenges cheap enough that it didn’t slow them down.

So Anubis now raises its difficulty automatically when the server is struggling. That still wasn’t quite enough on its own, so there’s one more layer now. If load spikes badly, the site temporarily goes private, meaning only logged-in users can read it. Bots get nothing to scrape, and it switches itself back off once things calm down. If you’re logged out when that happens you’ll get sent to the login page.

Fair warning that the private mode part hasn’t faced a real attack yet. It works in testing, but the real test comes next time we get hit. Considering we’ve been attacked almost daily, we will probably see soon enough. Here’s to hoping it holds.

Edit: Got attacked for a few hours again at ~18:30 UTC and it worked. Site went private on its own, stayed up, switched back when it calmed down. Federation unaffected. Hopefully this will hold any and all future attacks.

Hi,

A little while back we introduced old.retrolemmy.com. This is not really interesting on its own, but I wondered if we could also get it running on Retrofed. And this was successful by way of a proxy. The cool side effect the proxy had is that lemmy-only apps now also work if you enter old.retrofed.com in your preferred app.

This made the idea of preservation come up, and @[email protected] wondered if the proxy could be modified to also work on lemmybb and translate to older API versions. And after a while I got forum.retrolemmy.com to work with lemmybb - an old software for lemmy last updated 3 years ago - that makes the fediverse look and work like an old phpbb forum of older days. Most functions are working and functioning as intended, but there can still be some bugs here and there. Some we could probably fix, but some can also be attributed to the older software and it’s quirks.

If you notice any bugs, you can message me, or reply here.

Also, this project got pretty big, but if you want to use it yourself, its at Github. It has full 0.17, limited 0.18 and full 0.19 support for the frontend, and lemmy(current) or piefed for the backend.

This thread is posted via forum.retrolemmy.com

Edit: Known limitations:

• No 2fa. As this was only added in lemmy version 0.18.x
• No last reply date/time. This can be enabled, but will call a ton of API calls for every page load, making the site unusable.
• 500: Internal Server Error -There is a real, pre-existing bug in lemmyBB’s own code, where it makes a direct fetch, but doesnt handle a missing header gracefully. Unfortunately unfixable without changing the lemmyBB code (and that’s against the idea of this project)
• Old posts are at the top instead of new ones - This is because the posts are stickied in the community, making them always be on top. This is especially visible in the “General” community. The new posts are under the stickied posts.

Hi!

With all the tesseract drama going around, I thought I’d look into different frontend myself. And the only one that made immediate sense was mlmym - basically old reddit but for lemmy.

This is now available for everyone to use. And if you have any requests for other frontends let me know, and we’ll look in to it.

This is our 3 year anniversary! And without you guys this wouldn’t have happened. I’m glad we have all these passionate people all over the fediverse willing to post the most amazing retro content.

Thankfully it was another pretty quiet year for us as admins of this site. But this is business as usual for us by now, as our site usually doesn’t attract a lot of rowdy people.

This was the year that we launched our other retro inspired fedi-place called Retrofed, a PieFed based instance. This software has also proved to be great, and this is my preferred home for browsing myself (but, don’t worry, retrolemmy will remain to exist as long as we physically can). We have added topics and feeds there, that can make subscribing and/or following content much easier. Hopefully these feeds will also work on lemmy if and when lemmy 1.0 gets here.

I’m glad you people are here. It’s always amazing seeing a retrolemmy account in the wild, and it’s great seeing all the active communities and posts here too! Thanks for another fun year!

Cheers!

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.18.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

In our 3rd year of lemmy, we have decided to also host a PieFed instance. This instance is fully set up, and compatible with lemmy communities. Also, this instance is also set up with http included for old hardware. Meaning you can finally procrastinate on the fediverse on your old hardware!  

What is PieFed?

PieFed is a Lemmy/Mbin alternative written in Python with Flask. It is a younger software compared to lemmy, but the development goes blazingly fast (comparatively). And new features are added and improved often.  

Why host another? We already have lemmy.

Lemmy is amazing software, but might not be everybody’s favorite. We’d like to provide a little bit of choice, and piefed seemed an interesting alternative.

Is this the end of RetroLemmy?

No. RetroLemmy will remain functional and updated for the foreseeable future. If this changes in the future, we will let you know beforehand. Just know that we have no intention to scrap this instance.  

What does piefed do that lemmy don’t?

• Flair  

• Catagories and Topics  

• Feeds (like the Retrolemmy feed, in case you’ll miss the local feed of retrolemmy)  

• Community wikis  

• Consolidated Comments (View all comments from multiple related posts on one page)  

And more. Full list of features here.   

Will the communities move?

No. All communities are all still available and usable through RetroFed, so the communities can stay on lemmy.   

  If you have any other questions, you can reply here, or dm me or @[email protected] directly.

In case of emergency or downtime, I will try to give updates through mastodon. You can follow me @[email protected]

You can also message me there if you notice the site is down and I haven’t posted an update yet.

The recent downtime has put it to my attention that users might want to get updates if the site is down. I completely understand, and agree. I don’t intend to use this account much, so don’t expect the usual microblog nonsense from this account.

Thanks!

There is currently a big influx of new users. Most, if not all, being reddit refugees.

I want to welcome you all to the fediverse, lemmy and retrolemmy specifically. If you need help starting out you can either try [email protected] or you can comment here, post in this community or message me or @[email protected] directly. We are here to help.

Some basic things:

Usernames are usually written out as @[email protected]. The @ in front indicates a user. It looks like an e-mail adress by design, Because there can be users with the same name on different instances. For example: @[email protected]

Communities are usually written out as [email protected] . The exclamation point indicates a community. This also looks like an e-mail address because there can also be communities with the same name on different instances.

Sometimes new communities will not load. This usually means that the community is not yet federated. You can either manually add it to lemmy-federate or you can subscribe. That way the community is federated and posts will show up. If you make a new community it is always good practice to add it to Lemmy federate. To make sure it’s federated to all participating instances and maximize your user spread.

Here is a good FAQ via Lemm.ee.

Some good resources for finding communities:

https://lemmyverse.net/ - A website dedicated to finding new communities. Be sure to set your home instance using the domain name: for example: “retrolemmy.com”. This is to make sure that if you click a community, it automatically links it through your instance.

https://lemmy-federate.com/ - a website to post communities so that servers’ bots automatically subscribe to it, and it will show up in /all on all participating instances.

[email protected] - a community dedicated to promoting new communities.
[email protected] - same as above.
[email protected] - same as above.
[email protected] - lemmy apps community

Apps

There are loads of apps for your phone on the stores. Many of them were refitted from reddit apps to Lemmy. Here’s a big megathread with all kinds of apps via lemmy.world
Or you can go to https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ to find one not in the megathread

We hope you have a good time here!