Greetings, programs – er, ninjas:

Server Upgrades

We’ve been hard at work analyzing our analytics and tuning the site. If you’ve been watching our user growth, you would have noticed a dramatic increase in users last month corresponding to the Reddit exodus. Well, we certainly noticed. We started watching the server very closely and tuning it to give you the best experience. I won’t go into too much boring detail, but I will say that the server has substantially more resources. We hope this will help speed up your Lemmy-browsing experience.

Software Updates

We continue to keep Lemmy as up-to-date as possible. We’re now on Lemmy 0.18.4, which is the latest stable release. We work hard to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as we can. If the inconceivable happens and we miss a major release, you can help by letting us know about it in this community.

Admin Actions

We’ve also been hard at work monitoring our connection to the rest of the Fediverse. Our philosophy continues to be to maintain connections to as many instances as we possibly can. This means that we focus our administrative actions on users rather than communities or instances. We’ve banned spam bots and bad actors from other sites. If you see someone breaking the rules here or elsewhere, please report them so that we can investigate and, if necessary, take action. We like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt as much as we can, and we strive for a permissive application of the rules. On the same token, however, we don’t want to let a real problem fester and create serious issues for other administrators. So please help us keep the instance a friendly place by using that report button. It just brings the issue to our attention. No corrective action is taken automatically when you use it. And of course, thank you to everyone who has already helped us identify problems.

One of our tasks right now is to open more channels of communication between ourselves and the admins of other instances. This will help us better understand threats as they arise, and to deal with them before they impact your experience here.

Rules Updates

Speaking of rules, we have again removed some rules we felt were duplicative. Re-evaluating the rules and pruning excessive restrictions is an activity we revisit frequently. We want to make the rules easy to understand and remember. That usually means shortening them and keeping them simple, so don’t be surprised if we shorten that sidebar even more in the future. We haven’t added any new rules. If we do, you’ll hear about it here.

Moderators Needed!

We don’t have that many communities here at lemmy.ninja. But if you are subscribed to one and you don’t mind acting as a moderator, we could really use your help! Reach out to me or to @MrEUser@lemmy.ninja to let us know you’re interested and we’ll see about adding you to the team.

Our Roadmap

We plan to continue to improve Lemmy.ninja iteratively. Some things we have been considering are:

  • A mobile interface for the site
  • Alternative front-ends for you to use
  • Live site analytics
  • Collaborations with other instances

A lot of these things depend on how the site evolves and where we need to put our efforts. Nevertheless, these are some of the things that you might be seeing in the months ahead!

Wrapping Up

That’s all for now, ninjas! If you have ideas for the site, feel free to comment below. Questions, too!