Ahoy all you pirates, anarchists, neurodivergents, prompters and other assorted weirdos.

It is now officially 1 whole year since I got pissed off enough by Reddit's enshittification to set sail in my own ship, and what a journey it's been!

I never figured that I would ever run my own social media instance and when I started it, I assumed it would be something small for me and some people from reddit who knew me, ergo why I didn't invest in a new domain at the time (which I low-key regret now).

But the amount of people who joined immediately was extraordinary, catapulting and keeping this instance to the top 10 lemmies around, which is honestly wild to see for an inherently political and opinionated instance whose leading principles might as well be YOLO and FAFO. 😅

In fact I got so deep into lemmy and fediverse in general that since the past year, I started and am running 8 different fediverse FOSS projects. I keep thinking of new things to add or improve. I love the freedom I have in social media I can hack and that nobody will ever take away from us!

If you haven't yet, take a look at these:

• Fediseer: The Fediverse chain of trust
• Fedi-Safety: Protection against CSAM for fediverse administrators
• Pictrs-Safety: Protection against CSAM for pict-rs administrators
• Threativore: An automod bot to combat spam on Threadiverse
• Pythörhead: Python-Lemmy SDK
• Pythonseer: Python-Fediseer SDK
• Lemmy-Tagginator: Improves Lemmy-Mastodon discoverability
• Fluxa Avataria: Rotate your user avatars automatically using the AI Horde.

I believe our instance's success and how many people are subscribed to /c/piracy making that effectively that 2nd most subscribed community after /c/technology@lemmy.world goes to show that if reddit admins were more principled on moving their communities 1 year ago, a lot more niche communities would have flourished as well. But alas, I couldn't even get the /r/anarchism peeps to make an effort :S

On top of that, I am really happy to see our meme culture is strong with !adhd@lemmy.dbzer0.com and !leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com leading the pack. Not taking things seriously is a good principle to have, so keep it up!

Finally I like that we're still the only GenAI-focused instance while not being completely uncritical of the capitalist techbro hype-machine around this technology.

I also want to post a huge shout out to our instance admins who joined early and have been invaluable in keeping things under control while I'm focused on infrastructure stuff and other projects.

@RandomLegend, @unruffled, and @d1tt0 take a bow please!

But I would be remiss if I didn't let our admins who want to, say a few words for themselves

A few words from your admins

@RandomLegend

I'm very happy with how our community is standing together and remains a friendly and open place for many people.

Our mod & admin team made me really enjoy this whole lemmy journey. Being able to discuss things in a constructive manner, coming to agreements and being able to have compromises without feeling like anyone "lost" is really awesome!

I hope our community stays exactly the way it is. We are truly a community, we stand for each other and always help others to sail the high seas 😉

I plan on getting more involved with the different communities. Currently i mostly just lurk and moderate from off-stage but i hope i can show myself a little bit more and bring some engaging topics to our flag-waving crew!

@unruffled

This year, for me, involved quite a bit of learning about Lemmy and the Fediverse, after making the move from Reddit. We’ve had a few large waves of new incoming users to deal with over the past 12 months, often due to what was happening with Reddit at the time. It has been satisfying to be one of the few larger instances that has continued to manually review every application, to ensure we aren’t allowing bots, while still responding to new applications quickly. And it’s been great getting to know the rest of the admin team better and working collaboratively on any issues that arise.

I was involved in setting up the Community Edition (CE) of the Megathread on the db0 wiki, based on the Rentry version. Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to make edits/updates.

In the past few months, we’ve successfully pushed back against many trolls who seemed intent on turning every post into a political shouting match. Given that most of our users are here for the piracy community, not politics, I think that our ongoing efforts to mitigate this issue have delivered a net positive for the majority of our users’ experiences with Lemmy. If you haven’t noticed any of this stuff occurring, that’s great, because it means we have stayed on top of the issue. While not every moderation decision will please everyone (to put it mildy, lol), we are more interested in doing what’s best for the majority of our users, without resorting to defederation.

Looking forward into the next 12 months, I hope that our community continues to grow and prosper. With the ever-increasing “enshittification” of online services, piracy is one of the few effective ways we can resist and fight back against corporate greed. I'd also love to see more piracy-related communities still on Reddit or alternative platforms to make the leap over to Lemmy, or at least to start mirroring their communities here.

Finally, it would be amazing if a few more people could make a small monthly donation https://ko-fi.com/dbzer0 https://liberapay.com/db0/ to support our server costs, if you can afford it. I personally donate a few dollars each month, because I can’t ever see myself going back to Reddit now, and it really does feel good to support this endeavour. We don't make any profit from this project, and everyone in the admin team volunteers many hours of their time each week to keep things up and running smoothly.

A few prominent events

So much has happened in the last year so I thought it would be interesting to reminisce in a few of them relevant to our instance as our second year begins. Feel free to post your own in the comments

• /c/piracy gets banned by lemmy.world. We shrug. It get unbanned a few days later, only to be once more banned half a year down the line. We shrug again.
• I piss off hexbears by publicly rejecting "left unity", this causes a spiral or subsequent bad faith events that culminates with them banning the /0 admins from their instance. We laugh.

Upgrade to 0.19.4

Also, as it happens, I also just finished upgrading to 0.19.4 today and it really did not go as smoothly as I would have liked. Due to a leftover configuration from the very first lemmy deployment I did, I had big troubles getting pict-rs to migrate to 0.5 and that burned almost all my day yesterday troubleshooting. The problem is that the issue didn't appear immediately, but I had to wait 30 minutes every time to get the failure again.

Eventually I decided to go through with the update of 0.19.4 before pict-rs finished, but that by itself run into a bunch of other bugs, but fortunately nothing too disruptive. Eventually I was able to leave the pict-rs upgrade to run overnight and it's been stable since I woke up.

But nevertheless, the new version brings a ton of improvements and stability fixes. So huge props to the lemmy devs for doing the good work!

Funding

Thanks to everyone who donated in the past 5 months, we're now 80% to closing our half-year funding goal for paying for the server infrastructure. I would still fund this instance even out of pocket, but I really appreciate you all for assisting in this way.

Ko-fi	Liberapay