Pricefield.org Meta

we're running on a much beefier server this time than we had on aws so hopefully this will be the end of that story. i'm still setting up some automations -- in particular, we don't have a health check and restart script here yet so we might have some intermittent outages, but also, as far as i've seen those issues were due to overload and we shouldn't have to worry about that here.

i hope federation is working. that's the last big thing to check here

how the actual fuck is this site still operating lmao

i was just preparing some pages to inform you of the site moving to hetzner finally. everything was down, i thought the drive filled up again so i started the backup process and everything, and... it's just running? wtf?

it's not even the first time in the past week of the same happening.

sorry about the intermittent downtime. i have no clue what's happening now, and i did also reconfigure dns already, expecting the aws instance to not come back up, so there's a very good chance we are in fact going dark sometime in the next 24 hours. i'll do my best to keep it as short as possible but there's a very good chance you'll see a static message here at some point

I really need to download the whole server and bring it all over to Hetzner, we got plenty of space there and hopefully enough performance that the auto-restart script won't be sending me 3-4 emails a day or so.

I'll keep it up for storm week because it's storm week, but if it goes down for a day-ish after that without much of an announcement, that's what's happening.

For now, I have limited time, so I just gave it another 50 GB on AWS. It should be enough for a while.

Hey was wondering if you would be able to purge an image I posted from the cache. I deleted the post but its still cached as an image object and displayed on other instances

https://pricefield.org/pictrs/image/bb92d53c-0cd2-4d5b-91c7-9c0a18183de1.webp

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2345596

I have been having a ton of issues editing or replying to post. I am completely unable to do it and was wondering if they are the issue or if we are.

They also left transphobic comments on one of my post

It seems like we have been getting swarmed by downvotes as of late on nearly every single post. The source seems to be people browsing by new, as the downvotes always happen very early into a post's lifecycle, and the people are total "randoms" (as in, previously unknown users). I checked up on a few of them just to see if they're alts or bots (we did have a troll incident that we silently dealt with) but the traffic seems genuine.

Hopefully this can be reverted in the future, since downvotes tend to be a useful tool by the community, but for now we're trying the Blahaj Zone way of handling things.

For the technically minded, we went from a t3a.small EC2 instance to an m6a.large. Both are dual-core instances, but the t3a.small type is on AMD's Zen 1 architecture, while m6a.large is Zen 3 based, which is light years ahead (this is the equivalent of swapping out a Ryzen 1600 to a 5600X). On top of that, on the T instances you're expected to only use 20% of the CPU and there's a pretty heavy surcharge if you continuously use more, while on the M instances you just get the whole thing, so hosting costs are actually projected to be lower even with the jump in CPU capacity, plus we enjoy a nice jump from 2 GB of memory to 8 GB.

And yeah, while the conventional wisdom is that burstable instances are a great fit for web services, we actually have a remarkably flat CPU load. I'm thinking it's probably federation that drives most of it it rather than direct usage of the site. I'm also fairly sure a c6a.large instance would be more cost-effective (it's basically the same thing with half the memory for 12% cheaper) but that's something to maybe figure out later.

There has been an update to the way Lemmy handles the content security policy, in order to prevent similar attacks that happened to lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone. We have been running a custom CSP before, both to mitigate some attack vectors (although we wouldn't have caught this XSS) and to enable pulling fonts from Google Fonts, which is incompatible with the new security measures, so we're switching to a different solution there. The font will be back, it's just gonna take a sec.

Also, if you prefer this look, we're going to include a theme without the script font, as well as a few other variations.

Update: CSS files updated. We have four font options now:

• font 1: HelvetiHand, the menu font from Life is Strange. Would be a cool default but unfortunately it has some aliasing issues in some browsers.
• font 2: Neucha, the default font we use on the instance. Still similar to the game, but renders well.
• font 3: Dudu Calligraphy, the font from Max's diary. Unfortunately has the same issues as HelvetiHand.
• font 4: Helvetica, plain old and simple, if you'd like a non-script font. Since HelvetiHand was modeled after it it's weirdly fitting for a LiS community.

I understand that it is likely impossible to perform a direct 1 to 1 migration to another link software but I thought we must consider while we are a smaller instance regarding this.

[insert elevator music here]

update: we're halfway there

update 2: aaaand it's fixed

my name is SkyMTF but I mistyped and it's sktmtf instead

Great to see you here! If you're wondering what the hell this place is, you've come to the right place.

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What is Lemmy to begin with?

Lemmy is an interconnected network of forums. If you have used Reddit in the past, you will be familiar how these work: there are communities (for example, /c/pricefield, same way you have /r/pricefield on reddit), there are posts, cascading comments, upvotes, downvotes, crossposts, everything. You can use each of these communities just like you did on reddit.

The important part about Lemmy is it's not just one site, it's a whole bunch of different sites working together. You can see here the list of sites we work with, and each of them has a similar list as well. This is why Lemmy won't end up like Reddit, because each instance has different admins, so even if some of them go berserk, the rest can just keep on going without them. There is no other Reddit where you don't have to deal with u/spez's rampages, but there will always be another Lemmy.

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How do I start?

You should first pick an instance to make an account on. That will be your home instance, and you will access the rest of Lemmy through this instance. If you'd like to pick Pricefield.org, you can register here.

To start out, you could use our local communities: https://pricefield.org/communities

> Note: we have enabled email verification because of an onslaught of spambot registrations. You may find similar measures on other instances too, a lot of those that upgraded to 0.18.0 now require manual approval.

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But how do I access the rest of Lemmy?

If you want to use a community from a different instance, you have two ways of accessing it:

• You can search for it by switching to "All" on the community list page: https://pricefield.org/communities?listingType=All
• You can copy the URL to the community into your own instance, if you have found it previously.

For example, let's say you found this place: https://lemmy.world/c/stargate. This is the stargate community on the lemmy.world instance, so to open it on your home instance, you just need to say:

[home instance]/c/[community]@[instance] https://pricefield.org/c/[email protected]

and just like that, you can access it here: https://pricefield.org/c/[email protected]

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So, about this instance...

Pricefield.org is on the smaller end of instances you can find, focusing specifically on Life is Strange, the 2015 game by Don't Nod Entertainment, and the ship between Max and Chloe from that game. Currently, we have four communities:

• /c/pricefield, for Pricefield fluff
• /c/lifeisstrange, for discussion of Life is Strange, Before the Storm, and any eventual direct sequels (hopefully)
• /c/lis_franchise, for discussion of the entire franchise built around Life is Strange
• /c/meta, for anything concerning the instance

If you would like to create other communities related to LiS, you can, but we'd like to ask you to keep the instance focused on the game. While you can't seem to create communities on other instances with accounts you make here (not sure if that's a limitation in Lemmy itself or just its UI), you can absolutely moderate those communities with your Pricefield.org account, or you can participate here with non-local accounts. We would like to keep this instance as the LiS / Pricefield corner of Lemmy.

We do our best to keep registration open on this instance, and all fans of Life is Strange are welcome here.

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I have some technical issues

Yup, that happens sometimes. Feel free to post about it here, or if you can't, contact me on Discord (my username is @b3nsn0w there too), or on Matrix if you prefer that (I'm @[email protected] there). Lemmy is in its early days and still in active development, so it's gonna be a bit of a rough but exciting ride, but we're here to help you out with that.

The instance is pretty new, and I'm completely new to Lemmy, so there are bound to be some things that go sideways. If something doesn't work, don't hesitate to talk about it here -- or if even that doesn't work, drop me a message on Discord (I'm @b3nsn0w there too)