Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out the census! This was an exciting year, and for a lot of users it was their first year on lemmy.ca (and the fediverse in general).

For this census, the questions were more open ended, and it ended up being much harder to do data cleaning and analysis. However, it worked well as the first census because it gave us insight into what we might want to do differently in the future.

Some images may be hard to read, so please open them in a new tab to see them in full size.

---

The turnout was good, with 531 total responses in the 1 week that the census was open. That made up around 8% of the ~6500 total users on lemmy.ca, which feels like a nice sample size for some fun analysis.

To start off, here is a chart of the responses over time:

This one is pretty self explanatory, so moving on to the actual results!

---

---

Section 1: Where is everyone?

Question 1.1: Where are you from?

This question was broken down into a few parts.

Most users (~87%) are from Canada:

Next we can see which province and territories are represented (sorted by the number of responses):

If we compare to the population of Canada, this instance is somewhat consistent with the population distribution with some exceptions (if someone does a proper comparison, please share it! ). We have users from every province and territory, with the exception of Northwest Territories. The NWT community does have subscribers, so hopefully by next year we should have a response from there as well.

Next we can see where the users from the rest of the world are from (sorted by the number of responses):

Thanks for spending time on lemmy.ca everyone!

---

Question 1.2: How big is your community?

A handful of users (13) entered "suburban" as a custom response, so that could be something to add in the future:

However, what's interesting is that our results are very similar to the proportions reported by Statistics Canada for the 2021 Canadian census. We had 82.8% urban, 14.7% rural, and 2.4% other, while the 2021 Canadian census reported ~82.15% urban and ~17.8% rural (source).

---

Question 1.3: In your opinion, what is the quality of your internet connection?

To help those that don't have excellent internet, you can do small things like reducing the size of images before uploading them.

---

---

Section 2: Who are you?

Question 2.1: What age range do you fall into?

There was a lot of interest in seeing the results for this question:

We can see a nice curve, with a peak around 30-39. So the average age on Lemmy is likely a bit older than other social media platforms, but there's a good spread nonetheless.

---

Question 2.2: Ethnicity?

This was one of the questions that I couldn't analyze the way I was originally planning to. While allowing for multiple responses and user submissions allowed for more accurate self-identified responses, it made it difficult to visualize the data in a meaningful way. This data deserves a more in depth analysis, but for now I opted to create a word cloud so we could get a sense of what the responses were like.

NOTE: For this question and others that used a word cloud, I used this project to generate the results locally.

See the note at the bottom on potential bias and misleading results.

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 5 --relative_scaling 0.4

---

Question 2.3: What is your gender identity?

With this question, we can see that a large proportion of users identify as 'Man' (441), followed by 'Woman' (32), 'Non-Binary' (25), 'Genderfluid' (3), and the remaining responses were custom responses (1).

This is something that could use more analysis and comparison as the instance continues to grow.

---

Question 2.4: Are you someone with trans experience (meaning your gender identity does not align with your sex assigned at birth)?

In case it is hard to see from the graph, the breakdown was 'No' (472 | 93.8%), 'Yes' (28 | 5.3%), and the rest of the responses were custom responses (4 | 0.9%).

You can see Canadian census data for 'Sex at birth and gender' here: https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/census/census-engagement/community-supporter/sex-birth-gender

---

Question 2.5: How do you identify?

Similar to the other question above, this question allowed for multiple responses and user submissions, so it was difficult to visualize the data in a meaningful way.

See the note at the bottom on potential bias and misleading results.

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 6 --relative_scaling 0.55

---

Question 2.6: Disability Status (optional)

As this was an optional question with free responses and a small number of responses overall, I opted to manually clean the results and list out details from the responses. Hopefully this is still useful while also respecting the privacy of the respondents.

• "ADHD"
• "anxiety"
• "ASD/autism"
• "AuDHD"
• "bipolar disorder"
• "BPD"
• "colorblind (protanomaly)"
• "depression"
• "difficulty processing information"
• "fibromyalgia"
• "health decline due to age/life experiences"
• "learning disability"
• "neurodivergence"
• "partial deafness"
• "PTSD"
• "sensory issues"
• "struggles with mental health"
• "vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome"

---

Question 2.7: Educational Background

For this question, multiselect really didn't make sense. Some users included everything, and others picked their highest level of education. Instead, I manually cleaned all the results to answer "What is your highest level of education?". Other details that aren't captured in the graph include entries that highlighted that the program was in progress, or that they dropped out. With that in mind, I had to make some choices about how to clean the data, and my choices may not reflect the original intent of the respondents.

Next time should be better, as we can split this into a few questions:

• Highest level of education achieved
• School is in progress?

We could keep the multiselect option since 'highest level of education' doesn't get the full picture. We could also add "CÉGEP diploma", "College diploma", and "Other degree/diploma" as options.

Here are the raw counts for each of the original options:

• No formal education 8
• Secondary School 93
• Trade/Vocational Training 52
• Some College/University (no degree) 120
• Associate Degree 42
• Bachelor's Degree 223
• Master's Degree 55
• Professional Degree (MD, JD, MBA) 10
• Doctorate (PhD) 19

---

Question 2.8: Employment Status

We got a few custom responses, including 'active duty military', 'disability', etc. Those were included in the 'other' category, and we could add those options in the future.

The percentages are as follows:

• Employed Full-time: ~70.8%
• Employed Part-time: ~4.8%
• Self-Employed: ~7.1%
• Unemployed: ~6.7%
• Student: ~6.7%
• Homemaker: ~0.4%
• Retired: ~2.5%
• Other: ~1.0%

---

Question 2.9: Field of Work

This question was... a mess to try and clean and display. I tried to collapse as many similar responses as I could, but it felt like I was making more mistakes than I was fixing:

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 150 --relative_scaling 0.35

See the note at the bottom on potential bias and misleading results.

---

---

Section 3: Instance Usage

Question 3.1: Approximately how many lemmy.ca communities do you participate in?

---

Question 3.2: If you moderate any communities on lemmy.ca, how many do you moderate?

This one should be a number entry in the future.

---

Question 3.4: What community do you want to see on lemmy.ca? (optional)

Personal information was cut out and responses were split into multiple lines as appropriate. If I accidentally cut your response or you want to add something now, please comment below!

List of Requests

• amigurumi
• Analog photography
• anything urbanism, climate change, waste reduction/RE use etc related would be nice to have more activity
• Apple
• Birds, lots of birds
• Ottawa
• Author and book promotion help
• Batman
• DC comics
• bicycles
• binge eating disorder
• buildapcsales
• Canadian and local news
• Canadian Deals (software and other)
• Celeste community
• Chess
• Coffee
• Communities focued on discusison of specific video games, especially Paradox games and From The Depths
• fiction-writing and sharing communities
• dota2
• edmonton
• EMS
• Fibromyalgia or chronic illness communities
• Fine arts related
• First Nations-based communities
• French Canadian content
• FrugalCanada
• Furry
• gameboy verification. Those guyz were awesome and hard workers
• gaming sites
• more healthcare communities
• Hockey
• Hockey is a bit dead IMO
• HumansBeingBros
• I think you should leave
• Kamloops local
• knitting and similar things (crafts, etc.)
• Less with more. The main issue with federation is that there are several communities that cover the same topic. So you end up with fractured groups, or you participate in several communities that all have the same posts.
• Literary
• Loseit
• Maple Leafs
• Montreal
• More craft/art based communities
• more diverse communities
• movies
• nicevancouver
• Non-sided political discussion
• nursing
• personal finance canada
• personal finance canada
• plant and mineral identification communities
• poodles
• printsf
• [email protected]
• Quake Champions
• reading and/or viewing clubs, esp. for lesser known gems
• Reptiles!
• rupaulsdragrace (and variations)
• sasswitches
• Sleep apnea
• Snowboarding
• snowboarding
• Something link with cybersecurity and retro gaming
• Stocks
• superstonk
• Survivor
• Thoughtful conversation, although not very balanced currently.
• Unsolved mysteries
• Vancouver
• Vancouver
• Various fantasy literature ones
• [email protected]
• Wallpapers or art curation
• Wearable/smart_rings
• What is this thing
• witchesvspatriarchy
• worldnews

While we will also look into these communities, you are free to (and encouraged) to look through this list and get them going 🚀

---

Question 3.5: On average, how much time do you spend on Lemmy each day?

For the 28 people that said ">21 hours", here is a video of a baby sea otter taking a snooze (Joey from Vancouver Aquarium). While we love to have you here, feel free to use this video as you take a break and get some rest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBVT8HWEahM

---

Question 3.6: How do you access Lemmy most often?

In case it is hard to see from the graph, the breakdown was 'Desktop' (68 | 13.0%) and 'Mobile' (457 | 87.0%).

Not listed here were the custom responses:

• 3 submissions for "Tablet"
• 3 submissions for "Both about equally" (worded in different ways)

Both of these could be added as options in the future.

---

Question 3.7: On desktop, which interfaces do you use?

The default interface was the most popular, but each interface was preferred by some number of users.

---

Question 3.8: On mobile, which OS do you use?

Not listed here were:

• 1 submission for "GrapheneOS"
• 1 submission for "Debian"
• 1 submission for "None"

We could clarify these options in the future.

---

Question 3.9: On mobile, which app(s) do you use?

These options were submitted by users, and I included them in the graph: Avelon, Artic, Lemmios, Lemmur, Bean.

Not listed in the graph were:

• 22 submissions for "Web Browser" (worded in different ways)
• 4 submissions for "None"

All of these could be added as options in the future.

There were also comments about the lack of tablet apps, so if you're an app developer, this could be something to take a peek at 👀

---

Question 3.10: If you primarily access lemmy.ca through different Lemmy/Kbin instance, please list it below (optional)

Thanks for stopping by 😊, here is the list:

• beehaw.org (4)
• bookwormstory.social (1)
• lemmy.dbzer0.com (1)
• lemm.ee (2)
• lemmy.ca (1?)
• Lemmy.ml (1)
• lemmy.dnet.social (1)
• lemmy.world (9)
• kbin.social (1)
• sh.itjust.works (3)
• sopuli.xyz (1)
• startrek.website (1)

---

Question 3.11: What other Fediverse services do you use?

This one was sneakily edited to add a "none" option after a few responses came in.

These were custom responses which I added to the graph: Matrix, Owncast, Hubzilla, Diaspora, GNU Social, Funkwhale, GoToSocial, Soapbox, Wordpress, pump.io.

---

Section 4

Question 4.1: First, what's your favourite dessert?

Wow this one took a while to go through.

Here are some responses I collected while cleaning (sorry if I lost yours before thinking to do this):

• Anything that has Reese peanut butter cups/pieces in it. Reese is love. Reese is life.
• brownies although I just had some gingerbread men that were pretty bussin
• hard to say. just made some very tasty eggnog cinnamon rolls though
• Either jello formed from the tears of my enemies, or tiramisu. (No I don't have enemies really, I just thought it just sounded cool.)
• Pie. All of the pies. Except Meringue which is the devil's dessert topping.
• Lemmings
• The Sahara (I always mix these up)
• chocolate-stuffed chocolate topped with chocolate with a side of chocolate paired with hot chocolate

After cleaning the data, and consolidating similar responses into a format that could easily be searched, I can confidently say that the most popular dessert out of 527 entries was...

ICE CREAM 🍦

kind of...

There were 94 entries for different flavours of ice cream, and 97 total entries for other desserts that included ice cream. This doesn't even include the entries for things like gelato, frozen yogurt, etc.

• The most popular type was just ice cream with 54 entries, second to which was mint chocolate chip with 5 entries (with many other flavours having 3-4)

The closest other category was cake, which had 42 entries not including cheesecake, and 96 entries that included the word cake (including cheesecake).

• The most popular type of cake was chocolate cake, with 11 entries.

Another close category was pie, with 85 entries for different kinds of pie (not including similar foods such as tarts, crumbles, etc.)

• The most popular pie entries were pie with 17 entries, apple pie with 15 entries, pumpkin pie with 12 entries (with one specific to the Costco kind), key lime pie with 10 entries, pecan pie with 8 entries, and a few others.

Some other popular desserts/categories included:

• apple category: 25 entries
• brownies: 10 entries
• chocolate category: 55 entries
• cookies: 15 entries
• crème brûlée: 13 entries
• fresh fruit category: 9 entries
• nanaimo bars: 11 entries
• tiramisu: 23 entries

Some unique desserts included: affogato, baklava, beaver tails, blondies, gobi, gajar halwa, mochi, jalebi, knafeh, malassada, mango sticky rice, natas do ceu, pavlova, saskatoon berry pie, pouding chômeur, sachertorte, stroopwafel, vacherin, vermicelles, and vinarterta. (If you think your entry should be here, send me a message 😄)

Even a lot of the joke entries had repeats, with 4 entries along the lines of just desserts, 2 entries for your mom, 2 entries for revenge etc.

Additionally, 19 entries did not select anything, with 8 specifying that they couldn't pick, and 3 specifying that they did not like desserts.

Here is the word cloud (the generator ran into a bug that I couldn't fix where a lot of entries are duplicated, this will be swapped out when I can fix it):

The command I used for this graphic:

wordcloud_cli --text text.txt --imagefile wordcloud.png --prefer_horizontal 1 --width 720 --margin 10 --height 400 --colormask colormask.jpeg --random_state 5 --relative_scaling 0.5

---

Question 4.2: Do you have any other feedback for us? (optional)

We recieved so many kind words, thank you so much for taking the time to share them! ❤️❤️❤️

In addition to that, here are some other areas with questions, comments and feedback.

Organization Related

• when we will start accepting donations, and many comments about wanting to donate
• the status of the non-profit registration
• possiblity of setting up as a co-op

Technical

• upgrade to 0.19 was a bit bumpy (but otherwise good)
  • a few comments about not being able to log in since 0.19 (please try logging out and back in, it should fix it)
• The subscribed feed is preferred, as users may not want the experience to be Canada-focused
• (census specific): "None" should be an option as it is different from "skip"
• a few users didn't know about the other frontends, so we could do a better job of promoting them

Communities and Content

• More French content / usage
• looking for more guidance on how to grow the communities and build engagement, and other non-monetary ways to help
• local communities could have more informal discussion, as they are currently mostly news articles

Thank you everyone and stay tuned for the next census! 🎉

---

Appendix / Other Notes

POTENTIAL BIAS / MISLEADING RESULTS: Word Clouds

I had trouble with the word size variability, and I used the relative scaling option to try and make the word cloud more useful and representative while still being readable. This is based on my perception of the raw data, and while I did my best to minimize bias, I may have introduced some. If you have any suggestions for how to improve this in future years, please comment below!

People filled out the census with so much care and detail and these sections deserve nice visualizations. Word clouds are not good mediums for conveying information, so please keep all that in mind when looking at these results.

it was kind of stupid and I’m got bored of it I’m done with the logo crap so I’m going to do something else

I made the colors requested by

so I made it it’s still in progress but this is a look at at it

have your honest reviews

Last one was off center and colors were weird

It might look a bit pixelated but I’m making a new version but this should be in Canada but a Starbucks 😉 And also if your asking i don’t go to Starbucks often

Hey Admins!

Just because it's been a little while since the links were taken down/de-emphasized, I was just wondering if there's been any movement regarding donations or supporting the Lemmy.ca server and staff?

The new instance icon looks great!

yeah just join Lemmy Canada took me 10 hours to set up the account so I’m here I got a kbin as well I will post that later but hello Lemmy Canada 🇨🇦

Enjoy!

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-01-22_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.3_-_A_Few_Bugfixes

Before joining Mastodon I remember reading about how instance owners could potentially have access to their user’s chats and messages. I don’t think I ever saw this about Lemmy, or at least never looked into that much. Is that also the case here? How much info is accessible by the owners here?

That said I love the service and am happy to be here lol

I've done a quick upgrade to bring us up to 0.19.2, which should resolve the recent federation issues.

Heads up that on 0.19.2 admins also have the ability to now view up/down votes in the UI (rather than having to dig through the DB).

More details here: https://lemmy.ca/post/13038619

Hi folks, out of pure curiosity, I was poking some graphs.

It's been about half a year since the big API protest, so I was curious to see what Lemmy's crtitical mass looks like, what the staying power is, etc. Screenshots taken from https://the-federation.info/platform/73 on 2024-01-09. I'm posting screenshots because they're a snapshot in time, and because that stats server is very slow.

Because I'm posting on lemmy.ca, I'll post quite a few related to this instance, but it's probably more widely applicable and you can get graphs from your instance too. I'll also post some lemmy.world and lemmy.ml graphs, since they make interesting points of comparison -- biggest server, and original server.

First, lemmy-wide total users count, where this is a rolling one month window. If a user was online within the month, they count here.

First observation -- there's some jagged edges in the graph due to things popping in and out of the federation. So it's probably more useful to look at single servers. Lemmy.world came online pretty much coincidentally with the API protest and had open registration, so it makes a good data point. You can see the surge of users, then the plateau of the people who stuck around:

Lemmy.ml below has a similar curve, plus some sort of data artefact.

As does lemmy.ca, below:

I suspect the data artifact is related to the transition from 0.18 to 0.19 and something changed in the way active users was counted in between. Lemmy.world is still running 0.18.5.

Notes: The difference between the peak and the plateau is higher on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml -- I suspect this is because they were more popular places to sign up during the protest. Whereas lemmy.ca has retained more users, as a percentage. Still, the total number of active users on each server is quite low.

In the same order (total, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca), total posts. The slope of this line represents post rate. Steeper line is better. Flat line means dead instance.

And comments. I wish there was a comments to posts ratio, which would be some indication of engagement levels. But you can sort of work it out.

Anyway, looks like post rate has decreased slightly since the initial bump, but are still looking good. But the comment rate hasn't flattened as much. So the users that were retained seem to be more engaged than the users from the initial bump. I think this is a good thing for the health of lemmy. Likewise, the growth in supported apps, improvements to the software (Scaled sort in 0.19 is night-and-day better than anything prior!), and others will allow lemmy to not only survive, but be ready for whatever influx happens next.

I want to send a special shout out to all the admins, particularly on my home instance of lemmy.ca, and the coders who keep improving things. Thanks for giving us all a home!

When I click on the login link, I don't see the login section as shown in the screenshot. I've tried logging in using Edge, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. To no avail.

That's it. ♥️

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9631322

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

Last Friday we finally released Lemmy 0.19.0, after a long development time and extensive bug fixing. Read the announcement to find out about the major changes. A few days later on Wednesday we had to publish 0.19.1 to fix a few more bugs that slipped through.

@phiresky fixed the critical bug with outgoing federation in 0.19. Previously he fixed an authentication bug in lemmy-ui which was blocking the 0.19 release.

@dessalines fixed the broken logic for "hide read posts". He also fixed a problem with email login being case sensitive

@nutomic reenabled pushing to crates.io so Rust developers can easily interact with Lemmy. He also made performance optimizations for /api/v3/site and the optimized the Activitypub context sent by Lemmy, reducing the database size and the amount of data sent between instances. He fixed various tests to prevent random failures in continuous integration 1 2

@dullbananas has long been busy improving the database queries for Lemmy, such as fixing a bug in the way different posts sorts are combined, and improving the test cases.

This is our last update for 2023. It was a very busy year for Lemmy, and it looks like 2024 might have even more changes in store. So lets enjoy these holidays, have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

EDIT: Census is now closed. I should hopefully have results out by mid January!

---

Link here: https://forms.gle/fGP8WiN7MpdVQwsu7

---

As an exciting year for the instance draws to a close, we would love to learn more about our growing community. We invite all users on lemmy.ca, including those visiting our communities, to fill out this census/feedback form!

Please select "(skip this question)" on any question that you do not want to answer. If you would like to submit your responses some other way, please reach out to @[email protected] on Lemmy and we will see what we can do.

There are four sections:

• Section 1: Location
• Section 2: Demographics
• Section 3: Instance Usage
• Section 4: Feedback Form

The results will be aggregated, summarized, and posted on [email protected]. The results will not be shared with anyone else for any purpose.

Please comment with any issues or questions. You might remember this from the earlier post: Would people be interested in having an instance census sometime?

~~The census will close on Jan 01 2024~~

Hi Everyone!

We're now running the latest lemmy 0.19 release, you can see more details here: https://lemmy.ca/post/11378137

Note that you will need to re-enable 2FA on your account, all users had it turned off as part of this

You will most likely need to log out and back in for your client to work properly.

Hello All,

Our current admins have busy lives, but we want to make sure we're still on top of growing and maintaining lemmy.ca. As such we've decided to add two new admins to help out. Please welcome @[email protected] and @[email protected]. Both have been active with generating reports and keeping the site free from spammers and trolls, and both have experience moderating other communities too. We are confident they will help make the site even better!

Alien.top's raison-d'etre is to create bots and repost things from Reddit.

The instance makes a bot with the same username as the poster from reddit, then makes a bot with the same username as all the commenters, and re-posts each comment.

Every alien.top user in this thread is a bot.
https://lemmy.ca/post/10599153?scrollToComments=true

I did a quick check, and it looks like 138 of the comments are bots.

Apparently, while it's closed for new donations, liberapay is still going to renew existing ones.

A while ago we had a post about a new instance icon. Just wondering if there's any news on that?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7291022

Some months have passed on since the Reddit blackout this June. It led to an explosive growth in Lemmy users, and lots of urgent work in scaling, bug fixes, user onboarding and more. Since then things have calmed down significantly, giving us breathing room and time to get more long-term work done.

As of Nov. 2023, Lemmy is at ~36k active daily users 🥳 (those who have posted or commented within the last month). While user counts are not an explicit goal of ours, this is still a tremendous achievement, and one which we can all be proud to be a part of. It shows that people truly do want alternatives to US tech companies, and will use them if they exist.

Join-Lemmy Redesign

Most recently we've been working on a redesign of join-lemmy.org to provide a better onboarding experience and cater towards new users. This includes:

• A helpful new instance picker to reduce choice overload.
• The instances page is now filterable, based a set of topics and languages, as well as sortable based on activity. The default sort is Random, to encourage people to join smaller servers.
• The apps page now has sections for Android, iOS, and web apps, as well as libraries. Feel free to do a pull request to add any apps that are missing.
• The donate page now shows the total amount of monthly donations across all platforms. More details below.
• The technology used is Typescript with tailwind and daisyUI CSS frameworks.

For server admins: If your instance isn't listed already, you must explicitly add your server topics and languages by doing a pull request to this file.

As you may have noticed, texts on the website are unchanged, and images on the main page are still generic placeholders. We are hoping for your contributions to improve them. For the texts, edit this file. Translations are managed via weblate. Images are located in this folder. If you are good with AI tools, consider replacing main_federation.webp and similar with more colorful images. More main_screen_x.webp images with custom themes or alternative frontends would be nice too. In general feel free to open issues or pull requests for improvements to the site.

Funding Drive

Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

We've known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet's resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Recurring donations from Lemmy users are the most sustainable solution for the future. It also means that we need to worry less about funding, and can focus more on improving Lemmy. And instead of being accountable to an external organization, we work directly for Lemmy's users. While one-time donations are also welcome, they are too unpredictable for long-term planning.

You can find available donation options on the donate page. This page was also updated during the redesign to display current donations and funding goals. If each active Lemmy user donated ~€0.33 per month it would be enough for 3 full-time developers. So please consider donating if you use Lemmy every day. Our preferred donation platform is Liberapay because it doesn't have any payment fees or delays, and is itself open source.

Besides Lemmy's developers, please consider donating to those who develop open-source apps or software for the Lemmy ecosystem, as well as server admins and moderation teams who are the backbone of the Lemmyverse. We would be happy to add donation links for the above to join-lemmy.org as well!

If you have any suggestions in regards to the topics mentioned in this post, please let us know. We also want to use this opportunity to thank the countless contributors who are working on Lemmy now.

It might be cool to get some graphs to see what our growing community looks like. We could also make it an annual/biannual thing and see how things change over time.

We do something similar for our UBC community, and it can be pretty cool to see the results. For example, here is 2018 (we ran one in 2021 as well but haven't added the results of the wiki yet). Running a big official one infrequently seemed to increase participation and get better data. It also allowed us to include more questions without it feeling overwhelming.

If this sounds like a cool idea, what kind of questions should we include? Similarly, what is a good and privacy respecting platform to run it on?

Some potential ideas:

Demographics

• Age range (in 10 year intervals)
• Gender
• Province & Territory
• Urban vs. Rural
• Ethnicity
• Occupation / Career / Field of work

Instance Usage

• How long you spend on Lemmy
• What platform you use (multi-select)
• Other Fediverse services used
• Feedback on the instance or what you want to have added

Hello all and Happy Thanksgiving!

A few people have asked how the server is doing and I've been meaning to post some metrics for a while.

We're running on a "Advance-1 Gen 2" server with OVH hosted in Beauharnois, Quebec. This is a 6 core xeon 2386G with 32gb of ram and 2x 512gb nvme ssd's (raid 1). It's also ended up being pretty overkill for what we need so we may want to consider downgrading in the future, but it's relatively inexpensive ($130/mo) for what it is.

We store image uploads on OVH Object Storage, consuming about 430gb.

CPU peaks at barely 10%:

Similarly most of our RAM just gets used for filesystem caching. The pattern you see is due to a cronjob I have in place that restarts lemmy each night at 3am PT, since it seems to leak memory for us.

A few weeks ago we migrated our pict-rs over to OVH's object storage platform, so our disk needs are pretty minimal.

and with postgres basically just keeping the working DB in memory, disk IO is mostly just writes:

Database throughput shows some interesting activity happening for the past few days, but I just noticed and haven't dug into who/what might be causing this.

but still performance is fine with most queries returning in under 100ms

Lemmy tends to return 4xx errors hence the high error rates from nginx:

Most of our traffic is still ipv4:

Lastly, we use cloudflare as a caching proxy and ddos protection layer in front of our server. They absorb about 64% of our bandwidth usage:

Let me know if there's anything else you're curious about!