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Ben

I'm either in my shack or in the mountains (or posting here)

w0odl.com

@w0odl@mastodon.hams.social

Alt posting account: @BenDoubleU@lemmy.radio

Posts 49
Comments 68

(complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.19.7

Mostly small bug fixes

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-11-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.7

As always, let me know if any issues arise!

73,

w0odl

4

(complete) lemmy.radio upgrading from 0.19.3 to 0.19.6

This was a BIG one... and a lot of "fun". Click on the version numbers for release information.

0.19.4

This was a major upgrade from lemmy 0.19.3 to 0.19.4 which upgraded postgres to 16. This also gives us federation to a few new 3rd party applications like Wordpress and also lets us have local only communities.

0.19.5

Mostly bug fixes.

0.19.6

A lot of changes all over the place. Faster federation, lemmy-ui updates. Please checkout the release notes to see what new functionality we have!

As always, please let me know if any issues pop up. This was a MASSIVE update.

73,

w0odl

9

(incomplete plus downtime) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.19.5

Had a few issues upgrading the Postgres database and pictrs. The instance ran out of disk space during the upgrades and it took the site down for about 3 hours while I migrated us to a new server instance. We're now hosted on:

  • 16GB of ram
  • 8 CPU cores
  • 320GB of storage

... but we are still on Lemmy 0.19.3.

I'll attempt a new update soon, and hopefully with the new update, move our images over to an AWS/Linode bucket because we seem to double in space every 3 months and it's getting expensive.

73,

w0odl

2
How will this community survive its Eternal September?
  • We're using linode services(pretty much AWS) on this instance and we backup nightly, but not everything. I'd only want to implement a higher level of backups if we needed it because costs go up.

    I'd never really think/imply this is a business. I make no money from this. Just more in the thought of people working together to make this a better place, like a radio club!

  • How will this community survive its Eternal September?
  • Awesome post! Since you made the original post, I've actually already started a github wiki to address my concerns about what it would look like going forward. To address your concerns in line:

    • I'll always want this to be a selective community. But as you said, this may be more than what "I" want and that may need to change in the future.
    • People do make mistakes. I can tell you I have already as a moderator and that's just how things are.
    • For adding an admin, I have started a github organization that I would want someone to join who had experience in how things work and how to mitigate errors. I can tell you... I've brought down the site for an hour or 2 a few times and I hope no one noticed... And with the thought of money, I'm comfortable with where we are now with how much we cost, but going forward, there's a lot I'd like to add like better backups that I know would add cost to our instance.
    • I think this would always be the case. What we're almost talking about is treating this like a business where we just put the trust of this instance in people. That's where the aforementioned backups would help (hopefully)
    • You already have me thinking too much about not letting this fail! I think that what we are discussing isn't an overnight thing, but maybe over the coming year(s) we could implement.
    • There are already a lot of pull requests and issues on the lemmy github about GDPR, and it seems as though it's something that is sorta addressed already but is a big deal that will be fully addressed in the future
  • How will this community survive its Eternal September?
  • I've had that thought and we've talked about it a bit with respect to upgrades, but honestly, it opens a larger can of worms and trust levels.

    There's a lot of sensitive information that I'm already by default trusted with and finding someone that, to be honest, I can trust would be a big conversation.

    Also... deploying this ship is not the easiest thing in the world, even as a docker container. Documentation is like the wild west and sometimes, you have to take a best guess or know how docker deploys work or how the instance itself works.

    BUT you are correct. if this is going to be a long lasted instance, having other people on board would help. This started out as a fun thing I wanted to do for amateur radio enthusiasts but with the spirit of your post in mind, we'd need more people on board.

  • How will this community survive its Eternal September?
  • For the most part, I'm Johnny on the spot when I get a moderation email, I'd like to think. BUT! In the common IT trope of "what happens if Ben gets hit by a bus tomorrow, who would know what to do?", the answer is easily, let's add another mod. It's a fair question and I'd want to think on writing some sort of "what does being a mod here mean" type post and then ask for people who are interested. I already have a few in mind, just never actioned on it.

  • How will this community survive its Eternal September?
  • So if we're talking lemmy.radio or !amateur_radio@lemmy.radio, I can try to speak to that or give my thoughts on how things have been. (I guess we are talking lemmy.radio: OPs comment).

    lemmy.radio

    So we've been here just over a year! (YAY!). Of course, this instance was started like most instances because of the API policy that Reddit put in place around June/July of last year. Lemmy itself EXPLODED. I thought it'd be fun to start one specifically for amateur radio communities and people. The first month was crazy and it was almost hard to keep up on the number of people wanting to join. And just so people know, we have a VERY simple question I need answered when you join our instance: "What are your interests in amateur radio?" This very, VERY simple question weeded out a lot of new comers, and that was a decision I made early on. I wanted this place to be ONLY for people who are interested in amateur radio.

    My criteria for answering that question isn't strict. I'm sorta making up the numbers off the cuff but I'd say 60% of people respond with something that is a part of amateur radio (radios, contesting, digital modes, etc...), 25% try to join because because they like music radio, and the last 15% just give no answer. I ONLY LET IN THE 60%. And while there's no way for me to get a real answer to this: about 15-20 of our 267 users are "active" weekly, and I'd call maybe 3-4 of them "power users". This doesn't account for people who just use our instance to browse their subscribed communities.

    A few months after this instance was up, things of course slowed down. Moving to a new service is hard. On average, I have maybe 3-4 people asking to join our instance a month now. We've had a few big sign up times that mostly correspond to other fediverse events, or more recently, Reddit saying they may allow charging for use of certain communities.

    To get to the question: I like our slow growth. I like keeping this instance for us hams. In my opinion, it gives us a place to take care of and even police, because that's also a big part of amateur radio, and I greatly appreciate all of you for helping with that.

    In the future, we may see larger growth. We've only had 1 major outage and that was due to storage limits. It's just an issue with lemmy in general and I'm trying to see if the newest updates can help us with that so this doesn't become a money sink.

    So the answer for a DRASTIC GROWTH on our instance? It's only as big as I let it get for now because we are NOT an open instance and we have an entrance "exam".

    amateur_radio@lemmy.radio

    This is the big one for me. Not sure if anyone remembers, but this community started out as !ragchew@lemmy.radio, but it turns out, no one outside of our instance knew what that meant and NO ONE used it. So I turned it into amateur_radio, and we took off. And not to brag (maybe a little), we were up against a LOT of big instances who also had an amateur_radio community and now, we're basically the de facto community... which gets me to @vk6flab@lemmy.radio question: what happens if our awesome ham radio community explodes with usage, bad actors, or just spam?

    For the most part, it's just been moderation, and that's just been me so far. I DO have some numbers on this, and you can check Modlogs to check this. Over the past year, I've modded/deleted 12 posts:

    • 7 for spam
    • 3 for something that just didn't belong (people really, really think this place is about music radio)
    • 2 for abuse/hate speech

    As for user moderation: 5 people have been moderated, the breakdown being:

    • 3 were "timed out" meaning can't post for a week to a month. (2 of them harassed me like crazy on mastadon)
    • 1 was permanently banned for harassing people and saying very not cool things in comments on other instances
    • 1 was just given a talking to about site spamming, but I knew their heart was in the right place

    And those are important numbers! 99.99% of posts on our instance go to amateur_radio. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I mean it makes sense. Sometimes I wish our smaller baby communities got some love, but that's not how lemmy works really, especially when amateur_radio is a blanket term for all the other communities. So I DO focus on this community more than others, and it seems, so do you.

    I can definitely see a time when I'll add other moderators to this community, if anything because I see that a lot of you are taking care of it and monitoring it already. For now, I hope you think things seem copacetic. If you see the opposite, please let me know! As lemmy itself grows, that also means that amateur_radio will grow. So I would say that if we do see a DRASTIC SUDDEN growth, we up the moderators and have a frank talk about what this community is (and I hope this loooong comment speaks to what I want this community to be).

    I'm also always up for hearing other ideas in case that happens, especially if you have experience in something like this. Knowing how lemmy is, I wouldn't see that being a huge issue in the near future (famous last words), but I like what we've built and I want to make sure this community is a place we all enjoying sharing and posting in.

    73,

    Ben w0odl-

  • Received dm's can't be deleted? Dm's can't be closed?
  • I was, but with it being a mostly media heavy update, I wanted to put it off a bit. I'll look into it soon and maybe 0.19.5 as well. We may use image proxying in the future. This comment is mostly talking about new moderating tools. https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements

  • (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.19.3
  • I was tailing our logs before this update and we are definitely federating. HOWEVER, there is a **LOT ** of spam coming from a particular instance. I'm wondering if that was holding back some of the proliferation of our posts, comments, and votes.

  • (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.19.3
  • testing photo uploading after 0.19.3

  • (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.19.3

    This major update mostly fixes how pictrs, the local image hosting service, saves its data.

    As always, let me know if any issues arise. I don't think this will help with any federation issues we have been seeing. But now that we are on the latest and greatest patch, we can rule out versions being our issue for now.

    73,

    Ben w0odl

    6
    What's going on with our instance?
  • Just updated us to 0.19.1. Hoping this helps with federation issues https://lemmy.radio/post/2688577

  • (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.19.1

    This fix should fix some our federation problems hopefully. Please let me know if you see any issues and ESPECIALLY let me know if this seems to fix some of the federation issues we have been having. It may take some time for federation to catch up and I'm not 100% sure older posts and votes will catch up. I'm hoping that going forward, this fix will get us going.

    Thanks,

    w0odl

    16

    Looking for devops minded users

    Hey everyone!

    Life has really gotten in the way of me keeping up with updating and maintaining this lemmy instance. Work and a new family has me slow on updating this site.

    While I have no problem paying for it, it would be nice to have another mod who also had interest and experience with maintaining a lemmy instance or any linux experience.

    If you're interested, please comment here or message me.

    Thanks, Ben w0odl

    1
    @lemmy.radio Instance Admin - Please update the instance
  • Sorry! I try to stay up to date with this but work has been hell lately. This is a major update and may take a bit. I'll try to get on it this week.

  • lemmy.radio downtime today (11/25)

    Hey everyone!

    Just wanted to let everyone know we had a downtime of about 10 hours today. Around 8:00am EST, we maxed out our storage on this lemmy instance. I did get an alert for this, but there wasn't much I could do as I was out of town visiting family for Thanksgiving.

    I am very sorry for this. I should have paid closer attention to sizing on our instance. It has been slowly growing over the months and it just sprang up. Again, apologies.

    To fix this and hopefully solve any issues down the road, I have moved us to a new server with double the storage, double the CPUs, and double the memory.

    This did change our IP address. I have done as much as I can to invalidate and flush caches, and I think we're good to go now. If you do see issues with images not showing, you may need to hard refresh the page and flush your local DNS.

    If you have any questions or it seems like the instance isn't working correctly, please reach out to me.

    Thank you!

    Ben

    0

    (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.18.5

    1

    Retire this DMR community?

    Doing some lemmy.radio cleanup and I’m debating closing this in lieu of using !digitalmodes@lemmy.radio

    Thoughts or concerns?

    3

    (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.18.4

    0

    (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.18.3

    >This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

    Wow they weren't kidding. DB size shrank by quite a bit. Curious to see what this does with our CPU usage. Also want to see if our federated instances dropped. QUITE a few instances have either de-federated or have stopped functioning lately.

    As always, please let me know if you notice any issues, bad OR good!

    ~ 73 Ben

    1
    Commercial Interests Petition FCC for High Power Allocation on Shortwave Spectrum
  • “I AM being respectful.”

    It’s just not the case. It’s ok to voice an opinion but we can do so in a manner that doesn’t attack other people, and you did in my opinion.

    “This is why our democracy has come so close to failing-and you’re part of the reason why.

    Yes, I just said that. Think very carefully before you reply”

    That’s a threat.

  • Commercial Interests Petition FCC for High Power Allocation on Shortwave Spectrum
  • Let’s take this down a notch. Please refer to rule number 1

    Be respectful of others

    While not a mod of mastodon.radio, I want this to be civil.

  • Commercial Interests Petition FCC for High Power Allocation on Shortwave Spectrum

    16

    (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.18.2

    This was an emergency update due to a XSS vulnerability with custom emoji. Lemmy.Radio does not have any custom emoji so there shouldn't have been any issue if you have used it the past day.

    0
    Server error after updating Lemmy to 0.18.0
  • Is there a GitHub issue for this?

  • Started a new journey
  • Had someone at my local club show this radio off as a great SOTA radio. Really liked the size of it and the features it packed. Was debating on this or the KX2

  • Dual Championships on HF July 8-9, 2023
  • I’ve only contested during field day with my local club. Is the suggestion making a community here and using it to submit to contests? (If yea, then that sounds amazingly cool and I’m down, just not sure how it works)

  • Dual Championships on HF July 8-9, 2023

    The International Amateur Radio Union (IARU) HF World Championships begin at 1200 UTC on Saturday, July 8, 2023, and run through 1159 UTC on Sunday, July 9.

    4
    (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.18.1
  • This was a pretty smooth upgrade. Please let me know if you have any issues and also let me know if things seem faster with the site and federation!

  • (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.18.1
  • Some of the biggest changes/fixes with this release are intended to help with federating with other instances.

    Captcha has also been re-added, though we don't use that here.

    There are also new UI themes to select in your settings.

  • (complete) lemmy.radio upgrading to 0.18.1

    2

    First lemmy iOS app released to the App Store: Memmy

    apps.apple.com ‎Memmy for Lemmy

    ‎Discover the Fediverse with Memmy, a client built from the ground up for Lemmy. Discover new communities with people who share the same interests as you. Seamlessly explore the Fediverse with an intuitive search. Stay in the know with push notifications, included at no cost. Designed intuitively fo...

    ‎Memmy for Lemmy

    Posting from Memmy!

    13

    Call for Nominations for ARRL Director and Vice Director

    Attention to full ARRL members in the Atlantic, Dakota, Delta, Great Lakes, and Midwest Divisions. You have the opportunity to choose a Director and a Vice Director to represent you for a 3-year term beginning January 1, 2024.

    0
    www.newsweek.com Rare X-class solar flare wipes out radio signals in U.S.

    The solar flare was categorized as an X1.08-class flare, making it one of the most powerful classes of flare to be ejected from the sun.

    Rare X-class solar flare wipes out radio signals in U.S.

    cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/news/t/132010

    > The solar flare was categorized as an X1.08-class flare, making it one of the most powerful classes of flare to be ejected from the sun.

    1

    Antenna Theory Propagation

    cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/464196

    > cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/464181 > > > Succinct intuitive introduction to antenna theory.

    1
    radiofidelity.com The Critical Use of Radios In the Ukraine and Russian War – Radio Fidelity

    As the Ukraine and Russian war continues, this guide looks at how radio has played a significant role in the conflict.

    The Critical Use of Radios In the Ukraine and Russian War – Radio Fidelity

    Throughout history, radio technologies haven’t just influenced how we consume news and entertainment. They’ve also played an essential role in the communication strategies of soldiers and military groups, particularly during wartime.

    2